


Safety Pin

by MyMissus (oof1dficreally)



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band), One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 60,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5629591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oof1dficreally/pseuds/MyMissus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nine boys in 1966 England struggle to find their futures outside their supposedly temporary home in a "corrective school" - a place designed to catch up the forgotten and unwanted kids of London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A few things you guys should know about this fic:
> 
> 1\. It's already complete at roughly 60,000 words. I'll be posting it as I edit it.  
> 2\. I wrote the whole thing in under 30 days for NaNoWriMo. As I said, I'm editing it now but only making minor tweaks for grammar, misspellings, and removing anything truly terrible or pointless.
> 
> All that to say you don't have worry about it not finishing! I'll be updating rapidly as I go. But it is probably a little rough at spots. Overall, though, I think it came out really good, so I hope you like it :)

The journey to Avalon’s Home for At Risk Boys had a way of helping you forget where you were headed.

The bus cut through thicker and thicker trees as it ascended the country surrounding London an hour outside of it, two hours outside of it, three. It was a luxury bus. One of those ones Ashton remembered seeing parked at tourist traps like the London Eye when he was back at the group home, ones full of awe-struck faces and stuffed full luggage and another destination already in mind. The seats were comfortable, and he was sitting in a pair of them alone.

Across the aisle from him Cal was showing Luke the intricate artwork on a set of playing cards he’d swiped from the home before they left. Michael was leaning over the seat behind them, trying to swipe tens of clubs and kings from Calum’s hand. Luke had a sketchpad open and was selecting his favorites to try to recreate in colored pencil. Ashton kept glancing towards the driver’s end to make sure no one had spotted their contraband.

“How much longer are we in this damn thing?” Michael said.

“Sit down before they come back here,” was Ashton’s response.

Michael gave him a nasty look before slumping dejected back to his seat. Ashton had known Michael for two and a half years. He was the first person Ashton met when he was sent to the group home from the orphanage all that time ago. Ashton had yet to pinpoint exactly how long Michael had been in there before he arrived. Michael would have you believe it had been his whole life. Based on the snippets he’d picked up these last years, Ashton guessed it was probably since he was about thirteen.

Cal and Mikey were fast friends. Ashton had never seen Michael take to someone so fast. Cal got there a year later, and unlike Michael, he seemed to take to everyone pretty easily and make friends pretty fast, even more so than Ashton, who’d been surrounded by a flock at the orphanage since he was 5 years old. But it was different for Cal and Michael, something better, which is probably what made it so hard when Luke arrived.

Ashton first noticed Luke outside their old medical exam room. Usually Luke was pretty easy to miss, despite how unendingly tall he was. Luke never spoke a word. He did outside the exam room though. In fact he was screaming bloody murder. Ashton had been waiting his turn to get his routine monthly exam when Luke came bursting out the door and straight into the wall opposite it. At the orphanage, this was a very not good sign, so Ashton gave his orderly the slip and took off down the hall.

It wasn’t all that bad. When he got there, Ashton had put a hand on Luke to try to calm him and used the other to push in the exam room door to find a startled and wide eyed Dr. Raneheart. Dr. Raneheart was a pretty decent dude, as far as people at the home went, so it didn’t take long for Ashton to figure out that Luke just didn’t take too kindly to the home’s unceremonious physical exams. After Ashton’s orderly caught up with him, slammed him against the wall, and had a few words, Ashton was able to get a few words with the doctor, and, upon seeing Luke sitting calmly in a waiting room chair, he asked Ashton to come with Luke to their exams together from then on.

Ash had been nervous to introduce Luke to the boys. Actually that wasn’t quite it. He had been nervous to introduce Luke to Michael. This was 8 months ago now. Cal loved the kid, and so Ashton had been able to keep them all together, a family, even now, on this deceptive bus, from a burned down group home to a mysterious medical center and boarding school in the middle of no where.

The outside of Avalon’s Home for At Risk Boys had a way of helping you forget exactly what kind of place it was.

Ages old stone, massive turrets, sweeping landscape. “I’m a prestigious university,” it said to you even as Ashton knew it was a lovely face for a mental home for kids that no one wanted to deal with anymore. He was sure the boys would learn that soon enough. The trick was as long as the public never did, Avalon would have no concerns.

The boys gathered outside the door next to a pile of their shoddily packed belongings. The bus practically squealed away.

“Does everyone have all of their things?” he said.

The boys took quick visual inventory. A man on a megaphone fifty yards on rhythmically repeated, “Line up!” to the de-boarded newcomers.

“Cal packs like a girl,” said Michael. Luke wordlessly took the bag Calum couldn’t carry.

“Well, boys,” said Ashton. “Something tells me they want us to queue.”

As he moved to lead the way to the line in front, Ashton felt a nudge on his back. He turned to see Luke, decked out in his bags and Calum’s, with a questioning look in his eyes.

“I don’t know what to make of it, Lukey,” he admitted. “But we’re here now, aren’t we? I’m sure as fuck not walking the hundred miles back home.”

Luke chuckled. The four boys got in line.


	2. August 30th, 1966 – 10:40AM

The line meandered up the huge stone steps and into the main hallway where it was reassembled against the nearest interior wall. Ashton gently shoved the boy next to him a few steps in so his four could stick together at the end of it. A few orderlies – were they orderlies here or was there some other fancy lie of a word for it? – shuffled through papers and lists in front of them like the boys weren’t there and what was being discussed didn’t concern them, though it solely did. Ashton watched them head through the line handing out yellow slips and breaking the boys off into packs. He tried to sense a pattern, predict what was coming for them before it got there. This was his job.

“Move the hell over.”

“Michael,” he breathed, “I swear to shit.”

“Irwin?” the orderly or whatever read.

“Yes,” said Ash.

“Here you go.”

Ashton grabbed the paper from his hand before thinking of his own rudeness. It listed a wing – because of course there were wings in a place like this – a hall, a room number, and one more word Ashton couldn’t place in the scheme of things.

“What’s Horan?” he said, leaning over to look at Luke’s paper.

Luke’s didn’t say Horan it said Armatage, and as he examined it further he realized it didn’t say Ashton’s room, hall or wing either. He snatched Michael’s paper from his hand.

“What the hell, Ash?” he said, mid giggle with Calum.

“Where are you?”

“In front of your face.”

Michael had the same wing as Ashton, a hall close in number and at the bottom of his slip it said “Hood.” It all added up in Ashton’s head. He turned and shouted for the orderlies.

“Excuse me!”

“Head to your room, son.”

“No, excuse me.” Ashton took all of their slips from them, leaving a baffled group behind. “Excuse me. We’re not together.”

“Rooms are limited.”

“We were told we’d be kept together.”

“You were told there would be an effort to keep you together. But rooms are limited. Now get your things and head to your room with your designated assistant.”

“Ashton, what the hell?” Cal called after him and promptly got scolded for swearing.

Several orderlies – assistants – what the fuck ever – had started to usher the three of them towards the stairs. Or actually, upon further inspection, the two of them, as one was leading Luke to a hallway on the other side of the atrium. Luke trying to explain to him without words that one of the bags they were making him take with him wasn’t his.

“No. Hold on. Okay.” Ashton thought as fast as he could, shaking his hands in concentration, and turned back to the man who seemed to be in charge. “Put Cal with Luke.”

“Hey!” Michael called.

“Son, don’t start off on the wrong foot here, okay?”

“No, please,” Ash continued, “Mikey and I can be wherever, but please keep Cal with Luke. He just needs someone to help him adjust here.”

“We’re not in the same group of rooms?” Cal finally noticed.

“Son – “

“Please,” Ashton insisted. “It’s not that big a deal, is it?”

The man sighed. He snatched the yellow slips from Ashton’s hand, crossed out Luke’s and Michael’s last names and swapped them, scrawling his initial next to each change to authenticate it. When he slapped them back in Ashton’s hand he pulled him a bit closer and looked him in the eye.

“Don’t presume to know what a big deal is around here anymore, you got it?”

“Yes sir,” Ashton said, though he wanted to say several other things.

With a flick of the man’s hand, one of the orderlies with Cal and Michael led Michael in the direction they’d started to take Luke and shoved Luke back to the stairs, where he was visibly relieved to be able to hand Cal back his bag.

“Hey!” Michael called back to them. “Ash, what the fuck!”

“I’m sorry, Mikey!” Ash called back, his stomach sinking into his weak knees at the sight of Michael being pushed in the opposite direction.

“I don’t wanna fucking live alone!” The orderly with him continuously tisked him for the swears. Ashton felt he only had so many tisks left before the punishment got more severe.

“I’ll see if they can switch us, too, Mike!” Ash called trying not to trip as the three of them got pushed up the stairs. “You can be closer to the boys!”

“Yeah don’t do me any fucking favors!”

“We’ll see you at lunch, Mikey!” Cal called.

“Fuck – “

“Michael, stop swearing!” Ashton yelled but he could hear Michael not taking his advice as the door swung shut behind him.

At the top of the stairs, Cal and Luke were led in a different direction down an adjacent hall to where Ashton ended up. The orderly unlatched the door to the room with a flick of the handle, then left Ashton there to take care of the actual opening part himself.

He was relieved to be inside. He dropped his bag immediately and covered his face in his hands, taking several deep breaths, trying to wash the image of Michael being shoved through the door out of his head. He tried to remind himself, convince himself, over and over that Luke would have shattered on his own in a new place living with a stranger. He tried to pretend that Michael would forgive him before the day was through. So lost was he in his own imaginings that he didn’t even hear the boy at the desk by the window clear his throat until the second after he’d done it.

“One of the new boys, eh?”

Ashton tried to gather his polite self, the one he’d developed ages ago that got you extra food at the orphanage and pitied consideration by potential foster parents come to visit the kids.

“Hi, I’m Ashton,” he said and hoped it didn’t sound as hollow to this stranger as it did to himself.

“Niall,” he said and held out a hand.

“You been here long?” Ashton asked him.

“Little over a year,” Niall shrugged. “You come from the home then?”

Ashton nodded. “My friends – “ he started.

“Oh yeah, they’ll break you up. Says it hinders your personal recovery. Say a lot of things to be honest with you that I don’t quite understand.”

Niall had already sat back down at the desk where a notebook sat open holding hundreds of tiny, penciled in notes and numbers. As soon as he spotted Ashton eyeing it, Niall flipped the notebook shut. Not a glance to Ashton as he did it either, and that, coupled with the shrug and the easy handshake from before all seemed quite familiar to him. Ashton recognized that hand shake as well as he recognized himself in a mirror. He’d been doing it since he was ten years old.

“You from a home as well?” he asked.

And as Ashton had started to expect, Niall shook his head. “Nah. Came from a foster family, actually. Orphanage in Dublin to them, then here. Been probably the best place I’ve been so far, though, as funny as it is sometimes.”

“Why’d they send you here?”

Niall shrugged again. The shrug said, “I don’t really want to tell you yet.”

“Well,” Ashton moved his bag to the bed, exquisitely made. “Me, too.”

Niall looked up from the newspaper also turned open on his desk. “Oh, yeah?”

“Well, some of it. I was in an orphanage in London ‘til they put me in the city home. Then it burned down, which you probably heard. Or not. I don’t know how much they tell you guys here.”

“Well, word gets around whether they tell you or not,” said Niall. Then, as if it just occurred to him, “Hey, you didn’t do the burning, did you?”

Ashton chuckled. “No. Faulty wiring.”

“Not surprising,” Niall said.

“Not at all.”

There was a long but not uncomfortable or unpleasant pause.

“You got friends that came with you then, huh?”

“Three of them,” Ashton said. He was always ready to answer questions about his boys. “They let you see your friends here, though, right? I mean,” he said, trying to seem casual about it, “it can’t be as bad as the city home?”

Niall seemed to think that one over. “It’s different. Well. From the orphanage in Dublin anyway. I don’t know what they get up to in those other homes.”

“Yeah,” Ashton said, thoughtfully. “You probably don’t want to.”

There was a knock at the door. Niall didn’t make any moves to get up from where he was pouring over his newspaper, jotting more tiny numbers in pencil in his notebook. So, Ashton made a reluctant move for the door.

“Irwin?” said the man at the door in a crisp white uniform. Ashton nodded. “Come down to the Quagmire Room for orientation.”

He left before Ashton was allowed any follow up questions.

“What the hell…?”

“Language,” the man’s voice rang from down the hall. Ashton shut the door.

“Hey, when you’re done with orientation,” Niall said to his notebook, “you should meet up with me and the lads for lunch. You and your friends as well. We’re a bit strange,” he made a careful note in the margin, “but I mean. Everyone here’s supposed to be crazy anyway, so what does it matter?”

At the moment this place felt crazier than anyone Ashton had yet to meet in it. So far, the occupants seemed to be a sad kid, a quiet kid, a gay kid even though this was nineteen sixty god damn six, and two wayward orphans somehow too troublesome for even the shitty system they were already in. Ashton had to admit he was curious just what strange in this place was. And besides, if he and his boys were going to survive here, they’d probably need some help. Niall seemed as good a source for this as any. And just as he started to consider the fact that Niall was totally mad and making the whole orphan story up, he found himself saying,

“Yeah, alright. See you then. And hey,” he said, grabbing his jacket up just in case the Quagmire Room were in some other building, “what the hell is orientation anyway?” They definitely didn’t have anything like that at any other institution Ashton had attempted to call home.

“Oh, it’s great,” Niall said, sarcasm dripping out onto his newspaper. “You’re gonna learn all about our fine school.”


	3. August 30th, 1966 – 11:30AM

Ashton found Calum and Luke at the bottom of the stairs a few minutes later. A small string of other boys poured out of doors and hallways to converge in the main hall and head through another door behind the stairs.

“Is that how to get to Quagmire?” Ashton asked them.

Cal shrugged. “Dunno, we just waited for you.”

“Is everything okay in your room?”

Luke nodded. Cal shrugged again.

“I mean, it’s a room. How’s your roommate?”

It was Ashton’s turn to shrug. “Irish.”

Cal made a thoughtful noise.

Michael came out of the door he’d been dragged through and shut behind a moment later. He saw them, Ash could tell, but he ignored them. Ashton led the other boys to walk beside him anyway, and he allowed it. His right cheekbone looked a little red, and Ashton made a mental note to ask him about it tomorrow once he’d been forgiven.

“How’s your room?” Cal asked him because Cal knew he was the only one who could get away with it.

“Stupid,” Michael answered.

“Who do you live with?”

“A moron.”

“So, it’s a good match then?”

He tried to scoff but Ashton knew it was really a laugh.

They followed the small crowd down a flight of stairs into a dimly lit room in the basement lined with wooden folding chairs facing a projector screen hung from the far wall. Ashton was confused and frankly a little creeped out that everyone knew how to get here automatically. He didn’t recall being given a map. Also, in his experience, any time a series of uncomfortable chairs were uniformly lined up to face a bright, conspicuous screen, something sinisterly pro-establishment was about to go down. Ashton was not a fan. He stepped aside and let the guys fill in a row before he took the seat on the aisle.

“Good morning, everyone.”

There was a man now standing at the front of the room at a podium, or maybe he had been there the whole time and had just blended into his surroundings. He wore a brown tweed suit that looked itchy and uncomfortable. His expression was professional and pleasant, the sort that made Michael immediately raise one eyebrow, as he was doing right now.

“Welcome to Avalon. While the circumstances surrounding your departure from Plainview were unfortunate, we’re very pleased to be able to accept you into our home.”

“Oh my god, it’s a cult,” Ashton muttered so just the others could hear.

“I fucking knew it,” Michael muttered back. Cal and Luke bit their lips to avoid laughing.

“Let me introduce myself. I’m Leonard Wright, the Associate Dean here at Avalon. I oversee student life, which can encompass anything from meals to accommodations to assuring you’re on a schedule and learning at a cadence that is most conducive to your recovery.”

“Ashton, you’re gonna translate this later, right?” said Michael.

“Yeah, he’s the cruise director.”

Michael laughed. Ashton felt relieved.

“There are two other names you’ll run into frequently here at Avalon. The first is Dr. David Heiman.” Michael laughed again. “He’s our Chief Resident and will be personally overseeing all of your medical care, whether through regular prescription, therapy, homeopathy – whatever your personal recovery requires.”

“Calum chooses homo-pathy,” Michael said, and Calum finally cracked into a chuckle. Ashton could tell by Leonard's tightening smile that their comments were not going unheard.

“The other name is, of course, Benjamin Avalon,” – Michael repeated, “Of course!” – “the founder and headmaster of this school.” He paused as if the name were supposed to have some sort of effect. “I know what you’re thinking. I keep saying these words – school, student, education.”

“He hasn’t said ‘education’,” Calum said. Luke had to cover his face.

“Well, that’s because this is how Headmaster Avalon views this establishment. Not as a mental institution for the unwell or as a home for delinquents. Mr. Avalon believes that children are to be given every chance, no matter their circumstances, dispositions, or lots in life. When you enter Avalon, you leave your history at the door. Here, you will foster the coping mechanisms and tools you need not to simply get by, but to thrive in modern society. Our goal is not to keep you here, isolated. Our goal is for you to leave Avalon. In fact, if we have done our job correctly, you will be here no longer than one year.”

He tried, he honestly did, not to be cynical, but the first thing that popped into Ashton’s mind when Associate Dean Leonard Wright said “no longer than one year” was Niall saying “a little over a year” when Ashton asked how long he’d been here. And Niall was like him, or so he was told anyway. Just some orphan who’d probably misbehaved to the point the system didn’t know how to handle him. If Niall was here longer than a year, what would they do with Luke, who hadn’t said a thing in the eight months Ashton knew him? Or with Mikey, who’d been on suicide watch for the better part of two years? Or with Calum, who didn’t even have anything wrong with him in the first place but a couple of backwards, close-minded parents still living in 1950? If Niall was the best case scenario – a fairly polite, sound-minded, sound-bodied boy who simply didn’t have a place to go home to – and he was still here, how could what Leonard up there was saying be true? And if it wasn’t true – if the year-long timeline was a big old lie – then how could Ashton believe anything else they said?

Leonard said a few more things that the boys largely ignored, then they watched a film about how Avalon had been built, complete with a broad-shouldered, broad-smiled older gentleman jamming a shovel into the dirt to officially break ground, his other arm wrapped around the shoulders of an eight or ten year old curly haired boy Ashton had to assume was some poor orphan who had immediately been inducted into the “school” upon its completion.

When all was said and done they filed out of the back of the room and made their way back up the stairs, meandering towards the cafeteria where Ashton supposed he’d try to find Niall and introduce him to the boys. He thought about whether he’d ask Niall about what he’d just seen. He was having a really hard time at the moment sorting out how much he trusted this place or not, including the people in it.

“Less than a year sounds pretty good though, doesn’t it?” Calum said, almost always the unobstructed optimist of the four of them.

Luke nodded. Michael and Ashton exchanged a look. The look said, “We’ll only tell them if we have to.”


	4. August 30th, 1966 – 1PM

Avalon’s cafeteria was the closest thing in this whole place to the group home. Calum had been, frankly, a little overcome this whole time by how much the rich textures, dark colors, and ostentatious designs reminded him of his parent’s home, his old home of a few years ago. When they were sent to the “dining hall” Cal half expected to see hardwood floors, long mahogany tables, and some elaborate crystal chandelier hanging in the center of the ceiling. Instead, they were greeted by the usual Formica tables with plastic benches attached, the long assembly line for food, and the harsh fluorescent lighting. Cal supposed it was easier for cleanup, but it was still a small disappointment.

Ashton had some people for them to meet, and Cal was excited. Any place got exponentially better at the introduction of quality friends. Every new person was a possibility – someone to talk to, someone to organize massive games of “gum ante” poker, someone for Michael to actually like or Luke to actually talk to. People were the only thing that got you through something like this. Cal was endlessly grateful he’d found the people he did. He punched Michael in the shoulder, hoping he got the point of it. Michael glared at him in that friendly way he saved for Calum, so he probably did.

Before he even realized where they were headed (the three of them had a way of sort of blindly following Ashton like ducklings; it was a kind of comfort), Calum arrived at a table already half full of boys. Half full literally. Exactly one side of the table was packed with four boys occupying a three person bench; the one on the end had one foot out like he were a book end bracing them from all toppling onto the floor. Probably because the one in the middle wouldn’t stop squirming around and screaming for ketchup.

“Hey, man!” The blonde one nearest them said to Ashton. “You all oriented and stuff?”

“We have a certain awareness,” Ashton replied. “Do we go up there for the food?”

“Yeah, but it’s prime time now, so give it a sec. Meet everyone first. This is Liam.”

“Hello!” the boy next to the blonde replied. He had a very kind face, which is something people always said about Calum. Liam waved and then returned his hands to his lap where he was digging his nails into his opposite palm.

“That one’s Louis,” the blonde boy continued. Cal thought “that one” was an apt description. This was the boy jumping around in his seat and yelling about condiments.

“Hello, have you brought the packets?”

“Louis – “ the blonde started.

“I was promised hot sauce!”

“Quiet down, Mr. Tomlinson,” one of the aides called over.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

“And that down there is Zayn.”

This was the book end. He waved but didn’t say anything. His knees were bouncing at a mile a minute.

“Guys, this is Niall,” Ashton finished. Calum noticed Michael was already eyeing the line of food.

“Nice to meet you guys,” Cal said and gave everyone a wave. Liam smiled, as if acknowledging their mutual roles within their groups. “I’m Calum. This is Michael and Luke.”

Luke waved as well, shyly. Michael said, “Is that sausage?”

“I think we’re gonna get food,” Ash said, by way of apology. They headed for the line.

It was really a surprisingly good spread, all told. Cooked turkey, sausages (as Michael had expected), mashed potatoes, three or four veggies to choose from, and rolls with melted butter at the cap of the line. Back at their last home, their most common meal was pasta and meat sauce, but the meat wasn’t really meat, and rampant speculation since the moment he arrived there hadn’t led Calum to conclude what it actually was.

The cafeteria workers served them, but when Michael asked for more potatoes, he was accommodated without question. Calum could tell by his face that Ash had reservations about this place, and that was enough to make Calum have reservations, too. Ashton had been in one system or another since he was 7 months old; he was their guiding star. Not even Michael didn’t listen to Ashton. But Cal was having a hard time detecting where those reservations were coming from. At least their beds were comfortable and they were fed like people. He tried not to immediately start liking it until he and Ash had a chance to talk.

“This food is fucking incredible,” Michael said at the end of the line.

“Language,” the nearest cook said.

“Aw, you too??” said Michael. Ashton edged them all back to the table.

Left without any other choice, the four of them attempted to squeeze into one side of the table the same way the other four had. Luke being a certified giant and none of them very small otherwise, this was proving to be a task. Ashton ended up with barely half a leg on the bench.

“So,” Louis started, like he had just been waiting for everyone to take their seat. “How crazy are all of you? Are you like me crazy or just like Niall crazy? Or are you worse? Oh my god, did one of you burn down the group home??”

“I already asked,” Niall said. He had very little reaction to Louis’s questions, which meant this was just what Louis did and he didn’t mean any harm. This was how they all reacted when Michael yelled.

Louis looked disappointed. “Well, okay. That’s fine I guess. Well, I’ve got a ton of comic books and Liam’s got other sorts of books that are more boring than mine. Niall’s got a record player and a radio and Zayn is useless and just borrows shit from the rest of us.” An assistant passed the table as Louis spoke but didn’t rebuke him with “language.” Cal had already sorted out that’d be a losing battle. “You guys got anything cool? We pool together resources; it’s just what you do.”

“All of you?” Michael said, glancing around the cafeteria.

“What? Them??” said Louis, affronted. “Jesus Christ, no. Just the cool people.”

Cal assumed that meant the ones at this table and this table alone. He was pleased how easily they were now a part of this.

“Well, I’ve got a sketch book,” Ashton said, “and colored pencils and Cal swiped playing cards, like five packs of them. We didn’t have much.”

Cal nodded. “One’s from a casino in Arizona.”

“Okay, okay,” Louis said like he were calculating their value.

“Michael’s got a few records, but we only had a group player at the home, so.”

“Give those to Niall.”

“No,” Michael protested.

“Fair,” Louis immediately allowed.

As Niall and Michael started listing the records they’d each managed to smuggle, Calum watched the rest of the group. He saw Liam sneak a hand up from under the table and slide Louis’s tray just a little so the edge of it was perfectly aligned with the edge of the table. He saw Louis notice this and, instead of rolling his eyes or shouting as Calum had started to expect, he moved his napkin and utensils just a hair so they were evenly centered in their section of the tray. Liam gave him a small smile that Louis returned times five. He saw Zayn’s knees still jumping under the table, watched as he nudged Louis every few seconds and leaned over to whisper about something that it seemed only the two of them understood, their faces breaking out into mischievous smiles each time. Mostly, though, he watched his own friends, saw Michael get heated over the new direction Revolver was taking off of Rubber Soul, watched Luke’s shoulders slowly lower from a tense place up by his chin to a normal place of relative relaxation. He turned to the end of the table and saw Ashton watching everyone as well, exactly as he’d expect. He caught his eye and Ashton gave him a little nod, which meant that he was thinking exactly what Calum was – reservations aside, this could be an okay place if the people were okay first.

“So,” Louis slammed his hands down on the table making Luke and several people at other tables around them jump out of their seats. “Here’s the deal. You’re cool, we’re cool. We’re hanging out in Niall’s tonight and listening to records and you should all join us or, you know, don’t. Like I give a shit, I’ve got like six friends too many as it is.”

“You have four friends,” said Zayn.

“Shut up!”

Zayn just laughed.

“So. You in?” Louis pointed at Michael.

“I guess?” Michael looked to the others.

“You in?”

Calum nodded at Michael and then Louis. “Yeah, definitely man.”

“You in?”

“He’s in,” Ashton said, after visually conferring with Luke.

“Does he not fucking talk?”

“Do you not stop talking?” Ashton replied.

“Ha! Okay. Okay, so,” he pointed at Luke again. “Crazy.” He gestured to himself, Zayn, and Liam in a line. “Crazy.” Then Niall. “Misplaced.” Ashton. “Misplaced.” Then at Calum and Mike. “TBD. That’s the current tally.”

“You know, Lou, some people aren’t as comfortable being called crazy as others,” said Liam. “It’s just something to consider.”

Louis laid a hand gently on Liam’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said and he sounded like he actually, deeply meant it. “I will let everyone define themselves.”

“Thank you,” said Liam, and he beamed again.

“Okay, so what’s the deal? You guys in?”

Ashton surveyed the group, but he knew the answer. He always sensed the answer. “Yeah, we’re in. I mean,” he shrugged. “I live there, so it’ll be hard for me to avoid it.”

“Oh, you’ve got the best view, we’ll be there a fuckload,” Louis said.

“Yeah your view’s wicked,” said Zayn.

“Lucky me.”

Just then the tone of the room shifted in a way Calum couldn’t immediately put his finger on. It had got quieter, or louder, or somehow both, like more people started talking in quieter whispers. The others noticed as well, but no one on Niall’s side of the table reacted. Cal sat up a bit in his seat, trying to glance over heads, and all he could account for in terms of a change were the two people who just entered the room.

To be fair, he could easily see what made them so different. First, there was a boy, about their age, but he definitely didn’t live at the school. The standard outfit here was navy slacks and a light blue button up, which everyone could modify however it made them comfortable, but which were uniform nonetheless. This kid was wearing nicer clothes than Calum had probably ever seen in his life, and his family wasn’t by any means poor even before he was sent to the home. His hair was curly and worn longer than most rich families would allow. His eyes were super blue, just this vibrant clear color that stood out from across the room. He didn’t do anything profound – just looked around the room casually like he were looking for nothing in particular – but he captivated attention anyway. So much so that Cal didn’t notice for a solid minute that he’d walked in with Benjamin Avalon.

“That’s the dude from the film,” Michael muttered to Cal, like he’d realized it at the same time.

“Is that the boy from the film, too?” Ashton asked. That hadn’t occurred to Calum before.

“That’s his son,” Louis said, though he had yet to look up from his food or his side conversations with Zayn to be able to actually know that.

“He’s got a son?” Michael said.

“People have sons,” Louis replied.

“Yeah, but it just seems weird for a dude who runs a school full of other children,” said Michael.

Calum knew what he meant. “Yeah, like he’s devoted his life to kids that aren’t his.”

“Well, Harry lives here, too,” said Liam. Louis kicked him under the table. “Ow…”

“He does?” Michael was incredulous. “Like he goes here?”

No one else showed signs of giving an answer, so Niall jumped in. “No, they both live in a house in the back of the grounds.”

“So, what, does he, like, come here every day? Survey all that he’ll inherit and shit?” Michael pressed.

Once again, no one seemed eager to reply. “They come here sometimes,” Liam offered. Calum sensed that was the last one they were going to get.

Out of nowhere, Louis leapt from the table, tray in hand, and dumped half a piece of turkey and a whole pile of green beans into the nearest trash. He paused at the door only a moment to confer with an assistant before he darted out the door, down a hall, and out of sight. The only response from the table was Zayn eagerly sliding in to acquire a real seat.

“So, we’re super happy you boys can join us later,” Liam said, absentmindedly adjusting Zayn’s tray the same way he’d adjusted Louis’s. “We want you to feel super welcome here. We’re very nice people, and this is definitely going to be better than that group home you came from.”

“The guy who gave us orientation said we’d probably only be here a year,” Calum said. He was more testing the waters on that statement than anything. He already knew how Ashton and Michael felt about it when they’d left orientation, even if they’d tried to hide it.

Liam smiled, and Calum noticed for the first time how kind of sad his smile was. “You could be!” he said, an optimistic upturn to his voice.

Calum really liked him a lot already. But he didn’t like that answer.


	5. September 10th, 1966 – 4:24PM

There were always blind spots.

Little pockets in places and people even watchful eyes would never find.

Louis was a master at discovering blind spots. He knew every where’s and everyone’s within hours of first meeting them; it was how he could so easily conceal his own.

He was headed to one of Avalon’s blind spots now – a storage closet by a fourth floor bathroom you could slip to unattended if you went in the middle of a break – and he was headed there to see a blind spot of his own.

He was several minutes late, and he knew that. He felt guilty and defiant all at the same time. When he cracked the door open and slipped inside, however, Harry didn’t even start. He just slipped a scrap of paper into the place he’d finished reading and set his book next to himself on the crate on which he was draped. Harry didn’t sit. He only draped. Louis moved to him immediately, landing one knee on either side of him and grabbing his chin to pull him into a kiss.

He leaned into it with such force, Harry fell back gently onto the wall behind them. Instead of pushing back, Harry pulled him in more, and they were locked together tightly against the wall until Harry had to turn his head away from them to get air.

“Why are you late? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m just mad at you.”

“Oh, okay.”

Their lips locked again, teeth crashing clumsily into each other, Harry pushing this time forward, over until Louis slipped off his lap, next to him on the crate and against a perpendicular wall, Harry hung over him, hand pressed to the same wall to the side of his head, a protective barrier between Louis in his embrace and the door. Louis pulled away this time to brush the hair out of his eyes.

“Any particular reason?” Harry asked while Louis fidgeted with his hair.

“Huh?”

“That you’re mad at me.”

“No, just…everything. I don’t need a reason. Shut up.”

He leapt forward, wrapped his arms around Harry’s shoulders and pulled him into another kiss that made Harry brace himself on his hands, then elbows, until he was almost laying, but too tall to quite do it, so instead he knocked his head on the back wall of the closet and stayed there at an awkward and uncomfortable angle Louis refused to accommodate for. One of Harry’s hands slid up the back of Louis’s shirt and the other down the waist of his pants. Louis had already started on Harry’s belt and zipper several moments ago.

“It’s too small,” Harry breathed.

“Don’t be humble, it’s perfectly average.”

Harry laughed. “The fucking closet.”

“Aw, you’ve named it.”

“Louis – “

Louis sat bolt upright from where they were entangled. “Please just let me do this.” His voice was impatient barely covering desperate, and he knew he was super, majorly lying to himself. Harry saw every one of his blind spots. They weren’t hidden to him at all.

Harry propped himself back on an elbow and rubbed the back of his neck with a wince. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Jesus fuck.” Louis slumped down on the other side of the crate, his legs still wrapped up in Harry’s. “Can you not fucking therapy me please? I’m trying to forget you’re a normal person.”

“I’m not ‘therapying’ you,” Harry said. “I’m your boyfriend and I’m asking how you are.”

“I’m fine. I’m the same. I’m always the same.”

“Good.”

“Okay. Good.” Louis knew that didn’t sound as impatient as he wanted it to either. He knew it sounded just a little grateful.

“Are you really mad at me?”

“No.” He said it like he was.

“Are you just mad at the situation?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too.” Harry sat up. “C’mere.”

Louis wouldn’t move from the wall at first, even when Harry held out a hand to receive him. It was stupid and childish and indicative of why he attended this institution and Harry was going to inherit it. He felt like he could cry and he hated crying and he really hated ruining the meager amounts of time they had together even though he did it every time, because it was so meager and because he wanted it so much and because he knew that Harry didn’t see it as ruined at all even if he threw a total fit and that made it all that much worse.

He sat up finally and Harry rested his hand on the back of Louis’s neck and pulled him into a hug, the kind that made it hard for them both to breathe. Louis squeezed his eyes shut even tighter than he squeezed Harry in his arms. When they pulled apart, Harry kissed him gently but some how every bit as eager as when Louis had practically mauled him when he first walked in. They rested their foreheads together. Louis tucked his hands into the back of Harry’s sweater. He tried very, very, very, very hard to keep looking Harry in the eyes, though his wayward, chaotic lack of attention threatened to pull him away literally every fucking second that he stayed.

“How’re the guys?” Harry asked.

“They’re okay. I think Liam’s actually getting better. I mean like a bit. Zayn’s been up for like three weeks.”

“That’s a long time.”

“I know that.” That actually did sound impatient. He didn’t like when Harry sounded like he knew more about their conditions than they did. Louis knew more about himself than he ever fucking wanted to know in his life.

“Sorry,” said Harry. Louis really had, like, no blind spots with him at all.

“He’ll crash soon.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m on my meds now.”

“Yeah?”

“For a few weeks. They’re not really working though.”

“I know, I can feel you shaking. Do you wanna go?”

“No. Maybe they just need to build up in my system.”

“Well, stay on them longer than two weeks for once.”

Louis smiled. “Fuck you.”

There was a long and tense pause, Harry trying to make it less so by running a finger up and down Louis’s spine. Louis almost said what Harry was going to say before he could say it just to annoy him. He let it happen instead.

“If you did, you could probably test out.”

“And do what, Harry?”

“Leave with me.”

“Yeah. I know you have a high opinion of me and I appreciate it. But I don’t really think Oxford takes students, like, _directly_ from a mental home. Like I might at least have to attend an intermediary school before I take on advanced physics, you know?”

Harry smiled sadly. “Lou.”

“I’m just saying, kids go off roofs from the pressure of that shit even _without_ a history of intense, all-encompassing anxiety, so I’m pretty sure I’d be dead within the week.”

Harry winced. “That’s not funny.”

“Yeah, well, it’s real.”

“No it’s not.” Harry shook his head and so shook Louis’s head with him. “You wouldn’t do that. That’s not you. That’s just how you see you.”

Louis buried his face in Harry’s shoulder because he was ashamed he was ruining it again, and he told Harry so.

“I’m ruining it again.”

“No, you’re not. I love being here with you.”

“What if I never leave?” Louis said into his Harry’s sweater, not looking at him, barely letting the words escape, because that was the only way he could ever say it.

“You’re gonna leave.”

“The other day I was talking to Dr. Heiman, and I got so anxious I had to just walk in circles around him the entire fucking hour of the exam. Every time he asked me something he had to repeat himself at least once. I’m not just annoyed by myself anymore. I’m getting honestly fucking concerned.”

“You’re gonna leave, Louis.”

“I might not though. I might stay here and Liam will leave me and you’ll leave me and you’ll meet someone at uni who’s nicer than me and run away to San Francisco and never get haircuts.”

Harry laughed. Louis did that on purpose. His laugh made Louis feel better. Louis was kind of a selfish person.

“No, that’s you and me.”

“Swear?”

“Absolutely.”

Louis braved sitting up, still wrapped up in Harry’s limbs, half sitting in his lap. He wiped the corners of his eyes where he’d failed to control them.

“I’m a mess,” he muttered.

“Yeah, and smart and funny and loyal and caring and you make everyone around you feel better whenever you’re with them.”

Louis shrugged his shoulders like he were brushing off something unwanted and uncomfortable. “God, you’re obsessed with me.”

Harry smiled; there was a hint of mischief in it. “I kind of am.”

Louis returned the sentiment. “You know,” he said, “this closet is not that small.”

“The Fucking Closet.”

Louis laughed.

“I gotta go to dinner.”

Louis rolled his eyes. “Why do you eat at an old person time?”

Harry shrugged. “Because my father is quite old.”

“Fair.”

But he didn’t move. They sat gazing at each other, enduring hints of trouble in their expressions, until Harry started to jostle his legs and Louis along with them.

“Fine, fuck you.”

He was just going to leave right off. It was too hard saying goodbye every time, if only because he was never sure when they were going to be able to see each other again. But Harry snatched his wrist before his hand could make it to the handle and turned him so they were leaning together against the door, their foreheads rested together again. Louis stood up on his toes just enough to kiss Harry firmly, hungrily, but not as desperate as he usually would. It was the nicest way he knew how to do it. He couldn’t move for a few seconds afterwards. He just stayed locked in Harry’s eyes.

“Are you okay?” he practically whispered. He was happy he didn’t forget to ask.

“I’m better now,” Harry answered.

Louis slipped out of their private blind spot, leaving Harry to re-buckle his pants and wait a perfunctory handful of minutes alone. Despite his ruining it – an inevitable part of their regular visits – Louis knew this had been a good encounter overall. He knew it because he got all the way down to the first floor, through the door to the east wing, and half way down the hall to his room before he had to duck into the bathroom, lock himself into a stall, and stop himself from having a panic attack.


	6. September 17th 1966 – 8:52PM

Many things could be said about Avalon as it compared to the group home – the food was better, the orderlies (or assistants as they insisted on being called) much nicer, the overall building less overcome by the stench of industrial cleaner and sadness. That being said, however, eight people in a bedroom built for two was still a spectacularly tight fit.

Niall was sitting at his desk; Louis was sitting on it. Liam and Zayn were scrunched into Niall’s barely twin-sized bed, their legs crisscrossing over each other into a tangle in the unmade sheets. Calum and Luke were side by side in the middle of the floor, and Ashton was alphabetizing Niall’s and Michael’s records into one group-wide collection on his own bed. As for himself, Michael was fidgeting with the radio set on Niall’s bedside table trying to get pirate radio to come in clear. He could just barely hear the faint intro chords to “Summer in the City.”

“You both have two copies of My Generation,” said Ashton.

“Not enough, if you’re asking me,” Niall replied. Michael pointed at him in collusion.

“Louis,” Liam called from the bed. “Can you do me a massive favor, please?”

“Yes, love,” Louis said.

“Can you, um, just – can you fix – Ashton’s table is – “

Louis apparently spotted the misplaced items before Liam could fully articulate them. Liam kind of stuttered. It wasn’t obvious all of the time, and Michael probably noticed it more because it annoyed him. He realized that was kind of a dick thing to say because they guy wasn’t well, but it was true. He did it more when he was uncomfortable with something. This time it seemed to be Ashton’s table not being flush against the wall, or else the stuff on it was all messed up, because Louis was rearranging everything on there to be evenly spaced and aligned with the edges of the table as well.

“My masterpiece,” Louis exclaimed as he jumped back up onto the desk.

“Thank you so much,” Liam said. Zayn was asleep on his shoulder beside him.

Michael had a hard time imaging that, being bothered by things that weren’t even or things that came in odd numbers or things that weren’t clean, specifically that last one. He also couldn’t imagine being stricken with Louis’s constant hyperactivity; he had an easier time right now relating to Zayn. He wondered what Cal or Ash would say if he just curled up and went to sleep on them right now.

When he really thought of it, Michael couldn’t really relate to any of the boys he called his best friends either. It was just different with them. The most different with Cal, who he considered more like a brother, which he had none of at home and had always wanted. It wasn’t even that, actually. Not really. It was just something different. It was unique. It was Cal.

Either way, it meant he was, of course, as always, the one having the hardest time adjusting himself to these new hangouts with these four other boys even as Calum and Ashton acted as though they’d been friends for a hundred years. He was sometimes even a little offended by it, though Calum constantly reassured him they were just trying to fit in and that everything would always come down to just the three of them.

Four of them. He definitely couldn’t relate to Luke either. His eyes wandered now from the radio to Calum and Luke huddled together on the floor, bent over one of Cal’s swiped packs of cards playing a game. From what he could tell Calum was drawing a card and Luke was guessing if the next card he drew would be lower or higher than that. Of course Luke couldn’t actually guess a fucking thing – or wouldn’t – so he was tapping Calum’s right knee for lower and his left for higher and Michael was getting more and more annoyed.

“Where are my god damn tunes?” Louis asked.

“This is the best we’re gonna fucking do,” Michael said, and left the radio coming in mostly but with a layer of static over John Sebastian’s voice.

“You know,” Louis continued, hardly acknowledging Michael’s answer, “I never understood all the random noises in this song. Like I get it. You’re in a city. It’s right in the title.” He sat up straighter as if fueled by his own frustration. Maybe Michael could relate to him a little. “And.” He said like it were a complete sentence. “That’s not even what the city sounds like. Well, it’s not what London sounds like anyway. I mean, not from what I remember. Is that what London sounds like?” He pointed at Ashton, apparently their group’s most reliable narrator. Michael wouldn’t argue it.

“No,” he muttered, distracted by a My Generation EP.

“Well, he’s probably talking about New York City, isn’t he?” Liam offered diplomatically. “Aren’t The Lovin’ Spoonful from America?”

“Probably,” Louis spat. “Who isn’t?”

“I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” said Niall. “Just get lost there. Tons of really good music.”

“One of the kids at the orphanage was from New York,” Ashton said, still flipping through records. “We always tried to find out how we got over here, but he’d never tell us.”

“He was probably faking his accent,” Louis said.

Ashton stopped sorting and raised an eyebrow. “Huh.”

“Why’d you get kicked out of the orphanage anyway,” Louis said. “Seems like it’d be a better deal than a place like this. At least everyone’s normal there.”

Michael noticed Liam frown.

“Not really,” said Ash. “Everyone’s just dealing with different shit.”

“Yeah, but at least everyone’s in the same boat, right? And everyone feels bad for you, like Oliver or some shit. Like everyone wants to do their best to get you all a good home, not get rid of you.”

“Your opinions on orphanages and my experiences in them are very different.”

“Well,” Louis said, flippant, “still, you must have done something to get kicked out and put in a mental home.”

“I did.”

There was a long pause. The DJ was waxing poetic about “I Put A Spell On You” by the Animals.

“And?”

“And,” Ashton said, “Niall and Michael both have the My Generation single as well.”

“It’s fucking iconic, man,” Niall said. “It’s gonna be timeless, you wait and see.”

“I stole it from the night desk guy at the home.”

“Oh, that guy was a dick,” Calum chimed in.

“With good taste in music,” said Michael, and Calum chuckled.

“I’d go to New York with you, Niall,” Liam said, still stuck back on the other thing.

“Thanks, Liam.”

“I want to see a ton of the world.”

“Are you sure, Liam?” said Louis. “A lot of the world is uneven.”

Liam chuckled, but none of the others felt comfortable enough to do so.

“Well, I think I’d do it when that doesn’t bother me as much anymore.”

“And when will that be?”

“Lou – “ said Niall.

“What? I’m just asking.”

“Whenever he feels really up for it, I bet,” Calum said. Truth be told, Michael was thinking the same things Louis was. But that didn’t stop him from surging with pride when Calum spoke up.

“What does that mean?” Louis said.

“Well,” said Cal. “You know how you wake up some days and you’re just like – pancakes. I have to have pancakes for breakfast. And if I don’t have pancakes for breakfast, I’m going to spend the rest of my life until I do have them, thinking about having them.”

“They don’t serve pancakes here.”

“Well, then you probably know that feeling well.”

Louis didn’t have a comment, so Cal continued.

“Anyway, I think that happens with other stuff sometimes. You wake up and you say, ‘I’m gonna learn to skate.’ Or play guitar. Or something. And you might have thought that some other times in passing, but you never really meant it until one day you woke up and you were sure of it. Maybe one day, we’ll all wake up, and we’ll be sure we’re gonna get better. We’ll just know it. And then just like we’d make ourselves pancakes if we could, we’ll just…get there. Somehow. However we can.”

“Except you,” Michael said before he even thought of it. Michael said most things before he thought of them. He saw Calum wince even though he was trying to play it off as a smile, and Michael hoped he didn’t piss him off. He did that without thinking about it a lot, too. “You don’t need to get better.”

Calum nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess not.”

“Neither does Ashton.”

“Or Niall,” said Louis.

“So, what are they gonna do?” Michael asked. He actually really would like to know. He probably deserved to be in here. He felt terrible for Cal and Ash every day.

“Test out,” Ashton offered.

Michael smiled slyly. “Is that all?”

Ashton glared back. “Yup. Or turn eighteen. Whatever comes first.”

No one seemed to have too much else to say about that.

They sat around and listening to the pirate radio signal get weaker and weaker, Bob Dylan’s voice fading, fading like he were slowly floating out to sea. Cal and Luke continued their card game while Louis violently sketched cartoonish faces in their sketchpad, Ashton set up the vinyls on his own end table, and Zayn continued to sleep. As it got closer to nine, the boys’ internal clocks started to kick in – Michael’s too, even after just a few weeks at the school. They started to hear the orderlies knocking on doors farther down the hall calling for other gatherings of students to disband and prepare for lights out. Michael was suddenly filled with a desperate desire not to go back to his wing of the building alone.

“Get up, man, we gotta go.” Louis was not entirely gently rousing Zayn from his open-mouthed dosing on Liam’s shoulder. Without a word of acknowledgment, Zayn rose, slipped out of bed, grabbed the sweatshirt he’d left at the door, and left. Louis exchanged a significant look with Liam once he’d shut the door.

“He was up late drawing last night, I think,” Liam said.

Louis was visibly dissatisfied with this explanation, but unlike usual, he didn’t have a comment.

“Well, goodnight, Sweet Niall,” he said instead. “Dream of New York and tell us what it sounds like tomorrow.”

“Will do.”

“You want me to walk you to your room, Michael?” said Ash.

The irony was that he very much did. But he was still mad at Ashton for making him switch rooms away from Calum, so he scowled and shook his head instead.

“Okay. ‘Night then.”

Calum waved him goodbye at the end of the hall as he and Luke turned towards their love nest and left him alone in an empty school. Well, almost alone. The was an orderly – assistant – whatever – waiting for him at the end of the hall. They said it was to give you space to develop and grow outside of their constant supervision and it certainly made taking a shit the private experience God intended, but the way they just waited for them at the ends of halls in this place was somehow even more fucking creepy than the constant surveillance Michael had gotten used to before.

By the time he got back to his room, the clock had hit nine, and Michael was thankful. It meant that before his stupid roommate even had a chance to say something to him, he had to be quiet; the lights were out.

 

With a flick of his wrist Niall extinguished the last of the matches and left four candles lit along the radiator just below the window sill, illuminating his desk and all the papers and notebooks still on it in a soft orange glow, but hiding just out of view from the outside world. It was half past nine, and he was supposed to be asleep.

“What are you doing in those things anyway?” Ashton said, staying up himself, in his bed, a flashlight poised over one of Liam’s old pulp fictions.

“Sports stats,” Niall said, flipping a green composition book open to the page where he’d left off. “I follow all the footballers, some baseball from the states, stuff like that. Write down what they do – RBIs, shots on goal, whatever. And keep track of the season, see how everyone’s doing.”

“And what do you do with that?”

“I mean, not much. Mostly just try to figure out who’s going to championships, who’s top player, who’s getting in the cup. Just to see if I can do it. If I can get it right.”

“That’s…fucking incredible.” He was standing over Niall’s shoulder now. “That’s the tiniest I’ve ever seen anyone write.”

Niall laughed. “Everyone’s got a talent.”

Ashton perched back on the edge of his bed. “No, I’m serious. That’s a really impressive skill.”

“Yeah,” Niall said. “Would love to go to school for stats or something like that. You know, there are guys who do stuff like this for FIFA and all those guys. Real proper jobs; it’s crazy.”

“And you’d wanna do that?”

“Yeah. Well, that was the plan when I was with the Farmers.”

“Was that your foster family?”

Niall just nodded. Then all of a sudden he felt kind of ridiculous, like he were making a big deal out of something that wasn’t really a big deal at all. Most days, he felt kind of ashamed of where he’d been, what he’d done before he got here. But here he was in front of another kid just like him, and it just seemed silly to arbitrarily hold onto something that could actually feel really good to get off his chest. He stared at the last stat he wrote down and remembered how relieved he had been when he first told Louis, Louis being the first of the boys he’d told overall. He remembered how easily Louis had shrugged it off, not just shrugged it off but praised him for it and how that was when he decided he’d be friends with those boys for the rest of his life.

Ashton and his lads might never be Louis and his, but he was certainly a pretty decent guy. And he knew better than anyone Niall had ever met what he’d been through. He put down his pencil and looked up.

“I stole. A lot. Food, clothes, stuff like that.” Niall shrugged. “I lived with these people – I think they were well-intentioned to be honest. But they were very strict and very…thrifty. They had me, an older boy named Travis and two little ones, Robin and Joey. They made us all wear the same stuff from the same little wardrobe, which was ridiculous because the boys were ten and eleven each and Travis was a big guy, just a few months older than I was but the size of him – he used to box for money, I mean he was that big. And it just seemed absurd, sending those little kids to school in sweatshirts with holes and stains hanging down to their ankles. So I nicked them. Saw some sweaters or something in a shop window that I thought the boys would really like for Christmas. Got Trav with me, had him ask the clerk all about some toys on a shelf way across the store, and snatched them right from the window.”

Niall stopped to rearrange a few newspapers on his desk. He could still remember the way the store smelled, like pine, like a Christmas tree. He thought about the bakery they’d gone to next, Travis ordering a birthday cake they’d never pick up or pay for so Niall could make it out of there with a handful of sweet rolls from the bin. Rob and Joey had been so excited, even when Travis and Niall had told them where they’d come from.

“Feel bad for the shop owners, that’s for sure. They never did anything to me, you know? They didn’t keep food off our plates or make us wear shitty old sweatshirts. But mostly I feel bad because I didn’t feel bad about it at the time. Neither did Travis. Neither did the boys. We needed food, we got food. It was as simple to us as that. Now I’m here thinking Rob and Joe are out there somewhere thinking that’s okay, thinking that’s how you get by, and it’s not. Hope Travis got over it anyway. Maybe he took them with him when he turned 18 and moved out.”

“Why didn’t he end up in here?”

Niall shrugged. “He didn’t do much of it really. Didn’t make sense for all of us to take the fall. I started it, anyway, didn’t I? I really ended up doing most of it in the end. Probably why it was so easy for them to frame it as some kind of compulsion to be honest. And, honestly, maybe it was. Who knows. Hard to say what’s necessary and what just seems necessary in a situation like that.”

Ashton breathed in a way that sounded like a laugh. “I know,” he said.

“Yeah?”

There was a very long pause. Niall couldn’t tell at first if Ashton had gone back to reading or if he were just deep in thought. Eventually he reached over and carefully set his flashlight on the end table so it hit the ceiling and shed a delicate spotlight on the two of them, leaning in to talk from opposite sides of the room.

“I, um…” That one was definitely a laugh. “The thing is when I tell people this, there’s always a certain, um…expectation. And I just…want to be clear with you before I get into it, that I did this once, and I’m not going to do it again. Can you just…tell me you understand that, even before I tell you what it is?”

“Sure,” said Niall.

Ashton nodded. “Okay.” He nervously rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs. It seemed to calm him down. “Before I was in the home I was in this orphanage in Manchester called the Dunwell Inn. It was supposed to be a nicer place, kind of like this one is, where they’re supposed to treat you a bit better and give you, I don’t know, toys to play with and stuff. I was in another place in Cambridge before that. I’ve only ever lived in a foster home for less than a month.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah, well,” he breathe-laughed again. “It just never seems to work out. Anyway, the place in Cambridge was a nightmare, so I was kind of happy to be in this Manchester place and I met a few friends there. A few my age, one named Brian who had a little brother. His brother’s name was David, but everyone called him Little Bri, because they looked exactly alike just a few years apart. Anyway, Little – er, David – was a super talkative kid, so I got along with him really well because everyone always thought we were annoying and I was like, ‘nah, we’re just practicing to talk our way out of here, it’ll be cool.’ And he really liked me. And one day he came up to me and just asked me out of nowhere, he said, ‘I haven’t talked to Brian about this yet, but do you know this caretaker named Paul?’ And I did, he usually was in the, this room called the rec room. So I said ‘yeah,’ and he goes, ‘well, I don’t really like him that much.’ And that was all he would say to me. I kept trying to ask him, ‘what do you mean you don’t like him? Is he mean to you, does he pick on you?’ Like ‘what’s going on?’ And he would just say ‘I don’t like him’ and leave it at that.”

One of the candles on the window sill started to flicker, tossing jagged shadows onto the adjacent wall. Niall checked the clock and saw it was nearly ten o’clock.

“Anyway, I don’t want to get into it. Point is, Paul wasn’t a very good person and he wasn’t the only one of them. I actually tried to take it to the management, I don’t know why, because their response was as predictably disappointing as you’d imagine. A few of us tried to confront them on our own, but it was just…a battle we’d never win. I was only, like, fourteen years old. Then I tried to ignore it, thinking maybe he’d get adopted soon. But of course he never would because he’d never leave Brian, and no one wants someone after they’re, like, ten years old. At that point you’re just riding the wave to eighteen. I tried to tell Brian, and he wouldn’t listen. Told him to make David go to a home without him. He wouldn’t do it. And I had nothing left to do. And I couldn’t take it anymore. So I snuck them out.”

Niall scrunched his eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

“What I said. I snuck them out. Brian, David, and a few of the other boys David’s age who had been…taken advantage of by Paul. I got them out of the orphanage.”

“How?”

“I can find my way out of anything,” was Ashton’s simple and intriguing answer. Niall could see now why he’d prefaced this story the way that he did.

“Where did they go?”

Ashton only shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

Ashton shook his head.

And Niall got it now. See, to anyone else, even people like Louis or Liam or Zayn who had come from nice homes and relatively nice people who were maybe just a bit overwhelmed and didn’t know how to handle their problems, even to them this wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. They’d been in a bad place; Ashton had gotten them out of it. To them it’d be heroic, noble, as simple as that. But to Niall, who had gone from home to home, who had heard the complaints of money, of space, of time, who’d seen the worse end of a very bad thing over and over again since his parents died when he was five years old – to Niall he knew that what Ashton had done had been not very good. What was that saying? The devil you know? Orphanages, mental homes – these are bad places full of righteous people who don’t always have their best interests at heart. But the world? The was just one big, dark, lonely, unforgiving question mark. Niall knew what Ashton knew even if he’d forgotten it one time a few years ago – three square meals and a bed from the devil is better than the world’s indifference any day of the week.

“I heard from Brian once,” Ashton said quietly. “We were on a group outing to the park and he was there, hiding behind some tree by the playground. Said he remembered we came out here every other Wednesday and he just wanted to check in. He seemed fine, said he was anyway, but I got the weird sense he was hoping I had something for him. Money, food. I don’t know, just an idea of what he was supposed to do now I’d let him out of the orphanage. But I didn’t have anything to give him, and after a few minutes he said he had to go give out newspapers.”

“Maybe he did.”

Ashton smiled wryly. “Not at three in the afternoon.”

Niall nodded. An autumn night chill was starting to press against the window pane, carrying in the faint sounds of a few orderlies chatting while having a cigarette just below their window on the grounds.

“You turned yourself in?” Niall asked, though he already knew the answer.

Ashton must have sensed he knew the answer as well. He pulled himself back to the head of his bed and commandeered the flashlight to continue reading. He would have turned himself in, too. Hoping that meant the orphanage would go out and try to find the kids he’d set free. Of course he’d also know they wouldn’t.

The whole thing made Niall wonder – he and Ashton had been surviving their whole lives, and that was fine, and they’d do fine when they were 18 and thrown out to the wolves. They were wolves themselves now, somewhere inside of them. But Louis, Liam, the other boys under Ashton’s care. What would they do with themselves once they were 18? Move back in with their folks, the same people who’d sent them here in the first place? Try to make it on their own when all they’d ever known was the safety of their parents’ homes and the confines of Avalon? Or the worst one, the one they’d never talk about even really late at night – what if they weren’t allowed to go anywhere at all? What if they were just turned over to an adult facility where you might as well just start planning for your fucking funeral for all the chance you had of ever getting out of there with any kind of decent shot?

Soon enough, the weight of it sent Niall to bed, candles extinguished, covers pulled over his head, the glow of Ashton’s flashlight still shining through until after Niall fell fast asleep.


	7. September 23rd 1966 – 4:03PM

On Fridays Louis and Liam had arithmetic together in the first floor classroom. The classes they took were never hard for Liam; they were only designed to keep the boys up on basic skills and knowledge, just enough to be able to enter the workforce on a blue collar level once they’d been discharged from the school. So, he spent most of the hour helping Louis figure stuff out. Louis wasn’t dumb – he was actually massively brilliant when he put his mind to it – it was just the nature of the beast with him that it was almost impossible for him to concentrate. Liam finished his work, then sat with Louis in the back of the class to direct him through the assignment. When they left, he always gave Louis his notes, as he didn’t really need them.

“You write like a maniac,” Louis said, glancing over what Liam handed to him today.

“You as well,” Liam shot back.

“Well, I am one.”

“Well, me too.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, absentmindedly, reading.

“I am whatever you are, Lou.”

“And rightly so.”

Liam and Louis had been friends since Louis’s first day at Avalon, about a month and a half after Liam’s. Liam had always had a hard time making friends, and Avalon was no exception. He’d never been entirely sure what he was doing wrong; if he had been he certainly would have fixed it. It was easy enough to chalk it up to his disorder in normal school, but when he’d been unable to meet anyone here, he had to admit he had been pretty defeated.

Louis had a hard time adjusting to Avalon for entirely different reasons. Always the first to call himself and everyone around him crazy now, Liam suspected Louis was uncomfortable being diagnosed in the first place. He also knew he missed his sisters like hell. Louis was convinced they’d not be raised right without him. All this to say, the first few months Louis was at Avalon, before they met Zayn and Louis had his first encounter with Harry – the month the two of them called the Christmas Miracle – Louis was in a pretty dark place.

Zayn called the day Louis and Liam met their “meet cute,” which he said was what they called it when the guy met the girl in movies. Liam remembered it a little less picturesque than that. He’d stopped into the bathroom on the second floor on his way from his therapy session with Dr. Heiman to the lunch hall. There was an assistant outside the door, which meant someone was already in there. It had been Louis. Half out the bathroom window.

The thing was, Avalon’s window’s didn’t open more than three inches for obvious reasons, and the ones in the bathroom weren’t supposed to be able to open at all. But here Louis was, straddling the window sill, wild eyes gauging the distance to the ground, not in a really bad way, just in the way that he’d risk a broken leg just to get out of here.

When Liam walked in, Louis had barely seemed startled. He just regarded Liam, glanced back out the window and said to him,

“How bad do you think it would be?”

In the end Liam had convinced him that a jump from such a great height would, at minimum, render him unable to run the distance from the school to the woods and actually get out. So, Louis had settled for having lunch with him instead. He told Liam all about his sisters and his love of Spiderman and anything else that came to his mind. Then he did what Liam would probably never forget; he asked him a ton of questions about himself.

Liam would give Louis anything. That was the main takeaway from their friendship. And he knew Louis would do it in return. He had been a little scared when Zayn came along because he and Louis had been such fast friends and they liked all the same things; Louis never had to explain anything to Zayn about Spiderman he didn’t already know. But in the end, Louis was more than eager to include him. It was, in fact, Louis’s goal to amass as big a following as possible. ‘Following’ was the wrong word. The right word was probably ‘family.’

“When was the last time you saw him?” Liam asked as Louis still poured over his notes along the walk.

“He’s not here, he’s at his mum’s.”

“No, not Harry, I meant – “

“I know who you meant,” Louis said, stopping them in their tracks. “But I’m trying to discourage you from giving a shit, so I talked about him instead. And don’t say his name. You know you’re not supposed to.”

“Which one?”

“H. Either of them. Leave it alone, Liam. Leave him alone. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I know that,” Liam said, unconvinced.

Louis looked at him evenly. “You’re so full of shit.”

“Just help me sneak in.”

Louis rolled his eyes and continued to walk. “’Just’ help you sneak in? That’s the whole thing, Liam! That’s how it starts with you two.”

“I think you’re just jealous because you don’t want any competition.”

“Oh, please!” He knocked open the door to the hallway to their room. “You two can fucking have each other. I just don’t want you to get hurt. And you’re gonna get hurt. Right now, there’s just no avoiding it.”

“He’s our friend.”

“I’m not doing it.”

“And we should be there for him!”

“I’m not.”

“I help you in class because of your thing.”

“Throw that in my face why don’t you.”

“And you’re always fucking moving curtains and shit to make me feel better, aren’t you?”

“And don’t you ever forget it.”

“Then what’s the difference with him? Why am I not allowed to just go and – “

Louis turned on him. “Because you’re not gonna fix him Liam. His disorder isn’t situational. He doesn’t feel better. Ever. For anyone. Or anything. Not when he’s like this. You can’t… you can’t line some books up on a shelf to make him feel better or tell him to put his head between his knees and breathe. I want…” He sighed and looked at his sneakers. “I want to help him, too. Obviously. He’s my best friend. Sometimes. But he’s… he’s not right now.”

Liam met Zayn a week after Louis did, despite the fact he and Louis were basically inseparable at the time. Zayn was transferred in from a state home after his family had won an appeal on his entry. Liam had been wandering the grounds, wondering for the millionth time over those few days where Louis had gone off to and found he and Zayn outside kicking around footballs and screaming Rolling Stones lyrics at the top of their lungs.

At first he’d felt a little betrayed; he’d gotten rather used to the idea of having a best friend. But in true Louis fashion, he barely blinked before sending the football sailing to him and shouting,

“Liam, this is Zayn. What’s your favorite Stones song?”

Zayn had a lot of energy. Liam noticed this right away. And for the first several weeks he assumed he was in here for the same reason Louis was. The first time Zayn hit a low, it had been even more devastating for Louis than it had been for Liam. He got the idea that Louis had been pretty convinced they had the same thing, too.

What Louis didn’t understand was Zayn on his “good” days belonged to Louis. They ran around, caused trouble, flirted with other students – it was Zayn who’d encouraged Louis to go talk to Harry in the library after weeks of staring at him from behind bookshelves and muttering nasty things to Liam about how rich and well-dressed he was as a means of covering his attraction. Louis and Zayn sat around Zayn’s room and read comics until Louis got bored, made up his own stories with Marvel characters and Zayn drew them. This was the Zayn that Louis valued.

Zayn’s “bad” days were Liam’s.

The very first time he went missing on them, it had been Liam who actually found him. Curled up in a ball in the corner of his room. Arms wrapped around a pillow he’d pulled off his roommate’s bed. Eyes glazed over, gazing out the window. Liam asked him what he was looking at, and Zayn said he was watching the clouds move. So, Liam sat on a chair just next to him and called out shapes the clouds made until Zayn laid his head on Liam’s knee and they talked, actually talked. Talked about how crippled Zayn felt like this, about how he couldn’t control it any more than he could control his energy all the other times. Talked about how much it scared his mum and sisters. The next time they talked about their moms and sisters. They talked about their old schools. The time after that they talked about their fathers. Sometimes Zayn couldn’t talk at all and they just sat.

Liam didn’t know if it was making him better. All he knew, from experience after all, was that being with someone when you were sad was better than being alone. Liam thought Louis must like being alone when he wasn’t feeling well. Or else he was still offended that Zayn left him when he was in bouts like this. Either way, he knew this was a lost argument. He’d been lucky Louis helped him sneak into Zayn’s room the few times that he had. He headed to the hall by himself.

As usual, an assistant sat outside the door, back ridged in a leather padded chair, reading the paper. Like he were waiting for a train and not waiting for a seventeen year old boy to try to kill himself. There was no one else in the hall, so Liam lingered by the end of it. Several unfamiliar faces passed, and Liam kept his head bowed so as not to grab anyone’s attention.

Finally, Calum turned the corner, face flushed like he’d been out in the early fall chill, pulling off gloves and enthusiastically humming Paint It Black not so under his breath.

“Calum!”

Calum looked up, surprised. “Oh, hey man. What’s going on?”

“Can you do me a quick but not entirely in line with the rules favor?”

Calum nodded his head side to side, thinking it over. “Yeah, probably. What is it?”

“Can you distract that assistant down there, get him to step away from the door?”

Calum raised an eyebrow at the scene. “What’s he guarding, gold?”

Liam wasn’t sure how much any of the others knew. “Just…a friend. I want to get in to see him.”

His face got a little more grave. He looked like maybe he had a friend who might end up with an assistant outside his door once or twice as well.

“Yeah, man. Consider it done.”

Liam couldn’t hear exactly what Calum told the man, as he was still hung back at the end of the hall, trying to look inconspicuous. But within the next thirty seconds, he’d led him down the other end of the hall and around the corner. Liam snuck towards the door, gave the hall one last quick check, and slipped inside.

Zayn was laying in his mostly unmade bed facing away from the door to the window. His room was tiny; he’d been moved to his own shortly after his first episode. He was wearing the t-shirt he was wearing when Liam last saw him at lunch several days before. Without a word, he walked to the bed and climbed in next to him, back propped against the headboard, trying to follow Zayn’s eyes to the spot he was looking at out the window. Also without a word, Zayn reached back and draped an arm across Liam’s legs.

“Hello,” Liam said. Zayn didn’t respond. “You’re a really massive Beach Boys fan then, are you?” he said in response to the t-shirt. “Me, too. I wish I could put them on.” Zayn didn’t have anything in his room but the stuff he’d borrowed. He saw a stack of comics tossed haphazardly into a corner and book Liam had lent him on the floor where it had likely been thrown across the room.

“I think,” Liam started, “that the four of us would be a better band than the Beach Boys though.” Zayn didn’t say anything, but his hand shifted around Liam’s knee. “No, hear me out. Niall can play guitar. I mean I’ve never heard it, but he’s a trustworthy guy I believe him. Louis would be amazing in the press. He’d give the cheekiest answers. He’d give John Lennon a run for his money.” This time Liam swore he got a chuckle. “And you and me. Well. I’d be the nice one wouldn’t I? I usually am, in a band or not, it’s just what I do. So I could take care of that.”

Zayn hooked his arm all the way around Liam’s right leg now. When he spoke his voice was cracked and dry, like it hadn’t been used in a very long time. Of course Liam already knew it hadn’t been.

“What about me?”

Liam caught Zayn glance at him out of the corner of his eye, just a moment torn from the window. It was that kind of thing that was enough to keep coming here every single time.

“Well, you,” said Liam. “You’re the soulful one. You know, the artist. The one that everyone will say has ‘the vision.’ You’re the one,” He leaned over, resting his chin on Zayn’s shoulder, taking in almost the exact same view through the window, “who will get tired of it all first. Because you realize fame is all a lie. And you’ll go off to the country and live on a farm the rest of your life. And we’ll all come with you there. Because the band won’t be the same without you.”

Zayn’s arm was still hooked clumsy around Liam’s knee. He tugged on it and Liam landed all the way behind him, leg draped over Zayn’s legs now, chin still on his shoulder, left arm wrapped around his waist.

“How long have you been in here?” he whispered.

Zayn’s shrug lifted Liam’s chin with it.

“We miss you.”

“You do,” said Zayn, his voice not even a whisper, hardly more than a breath escaping his lips.

“We do,” Liam insisted.

Zayn rolled over onto his back, eyes still on the window, but letting Liam lay more comfortably on his chest. Liam nuzzled just below his chin and now, with his face this close to Zayn’s, he felt he could see exactly what he was seeing all along.

“Come back to us soon, okay?”

Zayn didn’t reply. A few minutes later, the stuffiness and warmth of the room got to Liam and fell asleep there on Zayn’s chest. He didn’t wake up until it was already dark out, and Zayn was fast asleep.


	8. October 12th 1966 – 8:32PM

Calum had never seen Ashton play footie before. He was quite too tall for it. Cal was finding it highly amusing.

He was out in the field behind the school, he and Niall two on two with Louis and Liam while Michael heckled them from the nearby sidelines. Calum and Luke had had a class up until a few minutes ago. When they’d found them here, they decided to hang back closer to the school and watch from a distance.

Calum hadn’t been outside in a few weeks, he realized. It was a lot cooler than he remembered, and he had a hand-me-down scarf tugged tight around his neck and shoulders. Luke was wearing one of Ashton’s old wool jackets that was too small by a not insignificant amount. He had the fingers cut off his gloves, because he always needed to be toying around with something. Today he was folding, unfolding, and refolding a paper crane.

“Ashton looks like one of those inflatable guys they have outside a used car lot,” Calum said, and Luke chuckled. Luke could chuckle without making any noise. “Every time he goes to kick the ball his foot has to cover so much ground it takes like six and a half years.”

It was getting cold enough now that the leaves were starting to turn colors on the trees; it looked like the whole forest that surrounded them was about to catch fire. Calum couldn’t remember the last time he’d been surrounded by so many vibrant naturally occurring colors, and he was struck suddenly by the desire to explore. This was the kind of thing he usually waited for Ashton to facilitate, or else he could count on Michael to whine about being bored long enough that, together, they’d come up with a plan. But now, here, without them, he watched Luke scan the woods as well, oranges, reds, and greens reflected in his crystal clear eyes making a collage of colors Cal found mesmerizing. He thought a lot about the time they’d spent as a splintered group these days. He decided he’d like to have a story to bring to dinner.

“You want to go walk to the edge of the woods?”

Luke’s eyebrows raised, scrunching his forehead. He immediately stood.

A few assistants peppered the path to the side of the school and down the adjacent hill. There was an approved way to meander around here, and these assistants outlined it. Michael was always talking about how creepy he found them, always around but never directly interacting with them. Like ghosts, he said, or like aliens observing them in their natural environment. Calum found them strangely comforting. He found the way they hovered but never approached respectful. He could tell now as they followed the path that Luke leaned more in Michael’s direction. Cal suspected he felt claustrophobic, watched. Sometimes to Luke, anyone he didn’t know that was too close to him was an impending threat.

Cal leaned over and conspiratorially nudged Luke in the side. “You know, I don’t think this path is gonna quite take us where we want to go.”

The trick was not to run. Everyone thought, the quicker you get your misbehaving done the better, because there’d be less time to catch you doing it. But they were wrong. The real trick, or so Calum had picked up from Ashton without Ashton ever really having to teach it, was to pretend like your misbehaving wasn’t misbehaving at all. If you made something out of the ordinary seem mundane, if you were convincing enough, anyone but the most self assured person would start to wonder – am I wrong? Was this thing actually really allowed all along?

Calum had seen Ashton do it with the most obviously out of bounds things. He and the boys had eaten candy, left the group behind on a trip to the local shops. One time he’d even convinced the kitchen staff that Luke was due to get a special meal and cake just for him on his birthday, just by walking up to the head cook and saying, “Can Luke get his birthday meal fifteen minutes early? He’s got to meet with his counselor at six.” That’s it. They just assumed then that he got one and they’d mistakenly forgot.

So, if Calum and Luke wanted to get farther into the woods, the trick wasn’t to run there, the trick was to convince everyone – convince even themselves – that that was just where the path was meant to go. Luke had a harder time acting casual about it than Cal did. But lucky for them, no one could really read Luke’s emotions but Ashton and Cal anyway. They were soon ducked behind the trees without even a sideways glance from the assistants on watch.

“I haven’t been in the woods in years, Lukey. Have you?”

Luke shook his head, unable to tear his eyes from the trees that surrounded them.

“My family lived in a row house in the middle of London. So even before we got to the home I hadn’t been this deep in nature in a while. This deep,” he laughed. “We’re like seven feet into the woods. Whatever.”

Luke smiled crookedly and pointed a finger between them.

“Hm?” said Cal. “Ah. Ha. Yeah, ‘we.’ Well you know. Ashton was always there, wasn’t he? And where there’s an Ashton there’s a we.”

Luke shrugged and tilted his head with implied skepticism.

“You’re right. Mikey was there first.” Luke nodded. “He’s doing okay here, don’t you think? I mean you think he’s doing okay in his own room?”

Luke shrugged smaller this time.

“Yeah. I felt bad about that.” Luke nodded smaller, too. “It’s not your fault, Luke. You’re youngest, that’s all. We didn’t want you on your own. Mike can come visit us whenever he wants. Hey, let’s go over to this clearing thing.”

Luke pointed back over his shoulder to the clearing they’d left behind.

“The other guys?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, they’re pretty cool, right? I like them. I like Liam. I like Louis, though I kind of expected not to. But he has this weird way of keeping people together even if he’s always trying to fight them.”

Luke laughed. He pointed to the field again and held up one finger.

“Zayn?” Cal said. Luke nodded. “Yeah I worry about that for Mikey, too. But I don’t think it’s the same thing. And you know what?”

He dropped onto a fallen log, propped precariously between two still upright trees along the clearing. The sun poured down in front of them, but where they sat there was still a biting chill. Gusts of wind brushed through the trees in steady bursts, shaking loose the browner leaves and sending them cascading down on Calum and Luke like a gentle, fragrant rain. Cal took a second to listen for any orderlies – assistants – calling for them, but nothing came to his ears.

“Does it bother you that he’s never told us his diagnosis?”

Luke raised an eyebrow and pointed at himself.

“Ha. Okay. Fair. Well it bothers me that he’s never told me. Do you…” But he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

There were exactly two people in the world with whom Calum felt completely comfortable discussing his sexuality – Ashton and Michael. Ashton because Ashton was the most understanding and open-minded person Calum thought probably walked the face of the Earth. Mikey because Mikey couldn’t take anything seriously if he were strapped to an electric chair and his life literally depended on it. Warden on the phone all, “If he can say one serious thing in this moment the judge agrees to a full pardon, no strings attached.” He still wouldn’t do it. It made him a strange kind of safe space.

Luke was different. Don’t get him wrong – there was nothing about Luke that seemed like he’d judge you or think less of you for it. And it wasn’t like he didn’t already know – it was openly acknowledged amongst the group. No, as completely backwards as it seemed to say – Luke was dangerous. He was a blank page. An open ear. A confessional. And he shouldn’t be. Because that wasn’t fair. And Calum tried really hard not to treat him that way. But, he thought, if he didn’t want to listen, wouldn’t he get up and walk away? But he didn’t. He was sitting here, surrounded by a halo of falling leaves, eagerly waiting for Calum to complete his thought. And Calum was terrified, frankly, what he could do when he wasn’t afraid of the response.

He compromised and stepped halfway there.

“Do you think Michael is jealous that I made more friends?”

Luke looked confused and pointed back to the field.

“I know, I was friends with Ash first. But I mean…do you think he’s mad at me for…being friends with you?”

Luke shook his head and pointed at himself, swiping his other hand through the air like he were declaring a bad call in a football match.

“He doesn’t not like you.”

Luke nodded emphatically.

“He does not. He’s just…he’s weird with new people.”

Luke started to count on his fingers.

Calum laughed. “Okay, okay, okay. Yes. You are not new anymore.”

He reached for his hand to stop him from counting. It stayed there a little too long. This is exactly the kind of precipice Calum was afraid of approaching.

“Will you promise me something? You can – “ He shifted in his seat to better face Luke in the shade under the trees. “ – You can say no if you want to, but it’d really mean a lot to me.”

Luke looked a little uncertain, but he nodded anyway. This was Luke.

“Can you try to reach out to Mikey a bit more?”

Luke looked uncertain about that.

“No, hear me out. I know he’s…a lot. But I’m really starting to worry about what these places are doing to him. I don’t know exactly his problem, but he doesn’t seem to be getting any better. None of us are. None of us even need to be here. And I just think of Ashton.” He stopped to take a breath and it was almost like a gulp. “And how he never even deserved to be in here in the first place. And you know he’s not gonna leave before all of the rest of us do. And I’m just scared Michael’s not gonna let go. Let him go. Let us. And don’t you want to?”

Luke looked down, moved leaves around the log into a pattern only he could envision.

“The eight of us – on good days – sitting up in Ash’s room listening to music, talking – that’s just what life is. We can do that. We can do that, together, some place else. We can totally make that work, don’t you think? I just feel like…” He sighed. “I feel like everyone is either afraid…or staying here for someone else who’s more afraid than they are. And neither of those seem like very good excuses to me. Right?” Luke looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t know how. “Luke?”

Despite popular opinion, not knowing what to say was not common for Luke at all. Cal was amazed, actually, how often he knew exactly what Luke meant to say, even if sometimes he took some liberties with his own interpretation of it.

“Lukey. What’s wrong?”

Luke couldn’t quite meet his eyes. He gestured to himself again, he kind of shrugged, and this was one of those times Calum thought he almost had spoken for how clearly he got what Luke was saying.

He shifted forward in his seat and took Luke’s hands, no way to blame it on an accident now at all.

“Luke,” said Cal. “You’d do fine out there, you hear me? There’s tons of stuff you can do, and you’ll do it really fucking well. So you won’t be a salesmen, okay?” Luke chuckled. “You won’t be a telephone operator. We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix up Mikey and go, the four of us. Where there’s an Ashton there’s a we, remember? And where there’s a we, there’s always a way to figure something out.”

They sat there quietly for a moment, Luke letting Calum keep his hands in his own until a handful of leaves fell down and started to cover them. Calum gently pulled his hands away.

“You want to head back to the others?”

Luke shrugged. Calum took the opportunity to interpret that as a yes.

When they got back there were no assistants waiting to admonish them; Cal was getting almost as good as this situational fibbing thing as Ashton was. He searched for the boys and found Liam, Niall, and Ashton gathered together, kicking the ball about in a circle. Ashton waved for them to come over. Michael was still on the sidelines a small distance apart from the others, looking off over the other side of the field, far away.


	9. October 31st 1966 – 10:49PM

It was Halloween night and the halls were empty.

Of all the days. Headmaster Avalon gave all of the support staff the night off to be home with their family, take their kids trick or treating, or enjoy the holiday as they saw fit. It was a nice gesture, but one that led to eerie results in a massive stone mansion full of mentally unstable teenage boys on a night where the wind was howling and everyone was celebrating a holiday known for mischief.

Liam ducked back into Niall’s room and found everyone exactly as he’d left them – huddled around Niall’s desk, the radio, and the annual rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. It was like a demented last supper where the radio was Jesus; seven boys compelled into stillness by the riveting nature of the story, some propped up by furniture, others propped up by each other. Liam took his place back on the floor next to Zayn, who lifted his arm without comment to drape it back over Liam’s shoulders. Liam set the plate of biscuits he’d nicked from the kitchen on the desk chair where they could all reach it. Normally he was not the one sent to steal stuff, but he had a good relationship with Erma and the rest of the staff. Louis reached for one without moving his eyes from the radio set and missed his mouth the first three times he attempted to eat it.

“I can’t believe people actually believed this,” Michael said, his voice sounding like he were just on the brink of taking to the streets to fight the aliens himself, or else hide under the covers from them.

“Well, it was a simpler time,” Calum replied and visibly shivered.

“Do you think this is how it’d really sound if aliens did show up?” said Louis. “I mean, do you think there’d be people still in the studios and everything?”

“Sure,” said Liam. “They sat there and reported through Pearl Harbor, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” Louis said.

“Probably not from Hawaii they didn’t,” said Zayn.

“Shut up, I can’t hear it,” Michael said.

“Oh,” said Louis, “I thought it wasn’t scary.”

Michael’s response was muttered and barely audible, but Liam thought it most closely resembled, “go fuck yourself.”

The room quieted again. The fake news reporter was instructing people to stay in their homes and be on the look out for giant spider-like creatures roaming the streets. Outside, a howl called up to the moon, one that sounded distinctly more human than animal, and Liam wondered what the other boys were getting up to in the other parts of the school.

“I think it was probably scarier for the aliens,” Zayn said, his face reflecting real contemplation. “At least before they landed. How were they supposed to know what they were going to run into, you know?”

“Maybe,” said Niall. “But they were very much shooting at us first.”

“Also none of it really happened,” Louis said. “So I think if anything the most affected group was a handful of water towers in rural Alabama.”

“You know what I meant,” said Zayn. “If it DID happen.”

“If it DID happen,” said Calum, “at least we’d be safe in this impenetrable fortress in the middle of fucking no where. I mean what would they come here looking for? There’s nothing around here for miles.”

“On the other hand,” said Lou, “there’s nothing around here for miles...”

There was a long and significant pause.

Michael started, “Okay, would the lot of you just shut the fuck – “

The door opened. All eight of them jumped and screamed.

So did the person walking in.

“Sorry,” he said, “it’s just me. Can I still come in?”

Harry peeked out from behind the door where he’d dived when everyone yelled. He was in a t-shirt and a cardigan and his hair was disheveled, which was the most normal Liam could ever remember seeing him look. This was Harry at 11PM. Louis had stood up from where’d he’d been kneeling on the floor, his face the same as if one of Orson Welles’ aliens had just asked to join them instead. Liam thought he remembered Louis mentioning that he’d told Harry about their plans for Halloween, but by the look of him now this was totally unexpected and Liam started to doubt this. By the look of Harry, he was starting to doubt this as well.

“I – “ Louis started to no avail.

“Oh shit,” said Michael, finally identifying who’d come in. “Are we in trouble?”

“What?” said Harry. “No.”

“Come on in, man,” said Niall. Harry stepped all the way inside and shut the door.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, still to Louis, Louis still only staring back.

“That’s okay,” Niall said in lieu of Louis’s response. “It’s just getting to the good part. The humans are gonna fight back.”

“Fight back,” Michael spat. “If by that you mean go out and shoot a bunch of water towers.”

“I already made that joke.” Louis was back. He slowly and cautiously sank back to his space on the floor, sliding over towards the wall to make a space between him and Zayn. He did this without making eye contact with Harry at all. But Harry was perceptive, and otherwise he knew Louis pretty well, so he went over next to him and sat.

Liam knew Louis well, too. Well enough to know he’d probably invited Harry here in a fit of affection and then completely forgot, or less so forgot and more tried to force from his mind that he’d put himself out there like that incase Harry didn’t take him up on the offer. He also knew that, despite what they’d all learned about Calum by now, Louis was still a little self conscious revealing this part of himself to the larger group. Lastly, Liam knew he’d be self conscious revealing just who he’d ended up laying his affections on. These were all little tells to Louis, little ways in which he revealed to other people that he wasn’t the tough cookie he liked to be interpreted as. Nonetheless, a few minutes more of quiet listening into the broadcast, and he’d wound his fingers round Harry’s surreptitiously where both their hands laid on the floor. Liam caught Louis’s eye and smiled, trying to say “good job” with as little condescension as possible. Louis only looked sheepishly away.

Niall was right. As the group got reabsorbed into the story, the wind still howling and pressing on the window pane, the moon shining brightly down nearly full, the humans in the story started to fight back making the story seem less and less realistic. Orson Welles’ voice boomed out of the radio’s little speakers. The air of quivering attention started to dissipate from the room and was replaced by the sleepy undertones of a bedtime story. Michael and Niall both fell asleep before the end of the broadcast. As soon as it was finished Calum and Luke said (and waved) their goodbyes and left for their room.

“See you tomorrow, mate,” Zayn said to Louis, ducking out from under Liam’s arm and heading for the door as well. Liam got an idea.

“I’ll head out with you.”

Zayn raised and eyebrow.

Louis said, “Liam.”

“I’m gonna head over to Zayn’s for a bit,” Liam said as conversationally as he could. “I’m not quite tired yet. I don’t wanna keep you awake.”

“I’m fine,” Louis said.

But Zayn’s lip had already started to curl, catching on, giving Liam permission.

“No, I insist, mate. Zayn and I are gonna finish reading that Edgar Allan Poe story anyway. You don’t wanna do that.”

Zayn chuckled. He had a childlike laugh. “Louis gets too scared.”

“I do not,” he said, indignantly. “I get too bored.”

“Well then we’ll definitely leave you out of it,” Liam said, a smile sly enough to match Zayn’s now. “See you tomorrow.”

The look of amusement on Harry’s face and look of panic on Louis’s made it clear that they both knew what was going on. Liam took off with Zayn and hoped Louis didn’t make some song and dance excuse to stay behind, that he just faced up to what he’d started in the first place and let poor Ashton go to bed.

“So mean…” Zayn said, smiling, as they headed down the hall.

Liam smiled back. “Just trying to help.”

 

No matter what part of the grounds they were on – whichever rarely used classroom or forgotten closet – Harry occupied it like he owned it. Louis rarely had to remind himself that he actually did. Or would anyway. At least here, in this deserted hallway on Halloween night Louis felt partially in charge, if not of the space, of the night itself, of the trouble it was known to stir up.

They were on the second floor, walking the long way to Louis’s room, taking in the paintings and tapestries on the walls and trying to avoid the inevitable. Well, Louis was anyway. Harry seemed genuinely interested in the art. Louis was feeling too nervous to hold his hand, no matter how few members of the personnel remained to roam the halls. Outside, the wind picked up, really trying to show off for the holiday. Leaves were whipping up against the window panes and creating a constant patter that kept threatening to pull Louis’s attention away.

“Where does your dad think you are?”

Harry shrugged. “I just told him I was going to walk around.”

“So, you’re gonna have to get back then.”

“He doesn’t check on me nearly as much as you seem to think he would.”

Louis couldn’t think of what to say to that. He didn’t think he considered that much at all. He could feel his hands getting clammy in his sweatshirt pockets, and the leaves outside were getting harder to ignore.

“I’m sorry again that I was late earlier,” Harry said. Sometimes he honestly sounded like one of Louis’s grandmother’s dinner guests.

“Not a big deal,” said Louis.

“Did you forget that you invited me?” Harry said. “Should I not have come?”

“I forgot. It’s fine.”

Louis could tell he wasn’t coming across nervous, he could tell he was coming across as a jerk, but for some reason causing a car crash was easier than trying to explain how he was actually feeling, so he just let Harry think whatever he’d want. The worst part was, as always, he was sure Harry would assume he was nervous far more quickly than he’d assume he was being mean, and this was one of a long and always growing list of reasons that Harry was a vastly better person than he was.

“So, how much longer are we gonna wander around before we go to your room?” Harry asked, casually looking over an old portrait of a woman and her cat.

Louis sighed. And turned the corner down the hall.

His room seemed exceptionally quiet, older and more full than it did on any normal day hanging out here with Liam. Liam’s bed was impeccably made, and his own was a roughed up mess. Harry sat on it anyway, because Harry had an agenda, and for once, Louis wasn’t eager to follow along. He didn’t like it when Harry was in the driver’s seat. It was too accurate. It ruined the lie.

“Are you okay?” Harry asked, because he asked it every time they saw each other.

“Yeah, are you okay?” Louis replied, filling an obligation more than anything.

“I’m better now. And,” Harry said, “I can go if you want me to.” But he sat back on the bed like he didn’t really mean it.

“I’ll fucking tell you what I want you to do, man,” said Louis. “You don’t have to keep checking on me like a child.”

“Well, then actually fucking talk to me. Or kiss me. Or something. Because it’s getting pretty awkward.” When Harry was at the point of swearing in that kind of tone of voice Louis knew he’d really pushed him.

He intended to jump on top of him; that was his usual method of deflection anyway, one that, Louis should point the fuck out, Harry was usually more than happy to accept. He was never begging for details on Louis’s fucking feelings when Louis was going down on him, no matter how fucked up or stressed or anxious he may have seemed.

He intended to jump on top of him, but somewhere half way between them he lost the momentum. Somewhere in the pit of his stomach something drained, and he slowed, and he sat next to Harry instead, laid his head on Harry’s shoulder. Harry slid his hand up Louis’s arm and squeezed his shoulder, pressing him closer, tilting his head until their faces were right next to each other.

“You’re worried I’m gonna bring it up.”

“And you know Liam left us alone so we could fuck.”

“Yeah, but that’s the carrot I’m gonna dangle in front of this conversation.”

Louis laughed. “Carrot.”

Harry did, too. “Stop. You’ve been avoiding it all year. We’re doing this.”

“I don’t have anything else to say about it,” Louis said. He felt like running but he stayed where he was, where he could feel Harry’s strong hands dig into his sweatshirt, where he could feel Harry’s breath on his skin, where he could try to match his heartbeat.

“I’m not leaving here unless you leave, too.”

“That’s stupid.”

“And I want to leave this spring when I graduate.”

“You should.”

“You need to talk to Dr. Heiman about your plan to be out of here by May.”

Louis squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep, shuddering breath. “That is not going to happen, Harry.”

“That’s shit, Louis, and you fucking know it.” There was that particular swearing again. “No one says you have to be perfect. You just have to be well enough to be discharged. They want to discharge you, okay? They want to be able to say they’ve helped and show that when people come here, they leave. I’ve been in enough damn meetings about this place to know that pretty well.”

“I’m fucking sure you all have beautiful goals,” Louis said, “but I’m not the one to up your numbers. Do you want to know what percentage of my attention during this very serious conversation is dedicated to that ticking clock on Liam’s night stand right now? Because I really think that you do not.”

“Lou.” He squeezed his shoulders tighter, and their faces got even closer than before. Louis could feel Harry’s eyelashes on his forehead. “Do you not really think that I’ll stay?”

“You think you can guilt me into getting better? Is that part of the official plan for recovery as well?”

“No,” said Harry. “But I definitely think you don’t believe me. If you stay here for another year, I will stay here for another year. If you stay here for five, I will, too. My dad wants me to help run the place anyway. He’d be more than thrilled. Do you not really think that I’d do that?”

Louis tried to shrug, but he was pulled to tightly to Harry’s side.

“Do you believe me that I love you?”

Louis didn’t answer. He believed that he loved Harry. That was the only explanation for this fucking insanity he’d gotten himself into. Did he believe Harry loved him? Sometimes it was very hard to understand how.

“Louis.”

“I don’t know, what do you want me to say? What does that even mean? Do you believe that I love you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Well, why?”

“Because you told me so.”

Louis turned his head until their noses ran into each other, and he kissed Harry hard. Harry didn’t hesitate, not even to keep having their conversation as he’d promised. He grabbed Louis’s other shoulder, then they were wrapped in each other’s arms, breathless, captured in this one, unending kiss. Louis swung his legs up onto the bed and kneeled over Harry until Harry moved his arms to Louis’s waist and the two of them fell backward on the bed.

It was an inevitable thing, unstoppable, like a wave tugging you out to sea then crashing you against the shore again, and it was just as frightening and just as joyful as that. Elated and terrified. No choice. His fingers tangled in Harry’s hair. Harry dislodged them just long enough to pull Louis’s sweatshirt over his head. The sheets already mussed from daily use got outright discarded along with shoes, pants, and anything else that stood in the way of the two of them.

Louis reached behind Harry’s back and pulled him away from the bed to press him closer to himself. He couldn’t be close enough if they were the same fucking person. This was how Louis was – insatiable, instant like a explosion. Harry was a slow burn. In between, they set the world on fire.

Louis first saw Harry the second week he was at Avalon.

He had been sitting in the library pouring over several books at once, studying. Louis assumed he was another patient at the school. He’d watched Harry slowly sip on a cup of tea, scratch the occasional note, flip pages less often than one would think was reasonable. He told himself he was mesmerized by how slow he moved. He told Liam he was trying to figure out why he was here. A few days after that he saw Harry with the headmaster and pieced it all together. He stopped going to the library for weeks.

It wasn’t until Zayn arrived that Louis even considered doing anything else but potentially recommencing to stare at him every now and again. Louis had only ever had one girlfriend back at home. Zayn made it feel totally normal to pine after some perfectly healthy rich boy from across a room. He started talking about taking risks and causing trouble just for the sake of it. Zayn had a way of bringing stuff up in Louis that no one else could, which was saying something as Louis prided himself on a reputation for causing a stir. After a few weeks of goading him, Louis thought it was time to shut Zayn up. So, he walked up to Harry in the library and sat down.

“You take suspiciously few notes. You’re the headmaster’s son?”

Harry had nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’m Louis. I go here.” He was compelled even then to be totally clear with Harry what he’d be getting himself into.

And he remembered that upon that information, Harry had smiled. “I hope you don’t mind me using your space.”

Louis raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t thought of that, yeah. Don’t you have a library all your own?”

“Not as good as this one.”

“Well, look at us. Fancy. Half the people here can’t even read.”

Harry laughed again. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Well I can’t anyway. I mean I can, but I don’t have the concentration for it. What are you studying for anyway?”

“A levels.”

“Smart.”

“It’s just normal, I think.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about normal.”

And this was the smile Louis would remember forever, the one that was both a kindness and a dare, the one Harry – who smiled plenty – seemed to always save just for him. This was the first time Louis found out he got a smile, though it’d be days and weeks before he realized it meant Harry was scared of him, scared and exhilarated, feeling the same crushing wave that Louis always did when they met. He’d remember it anyway, because after he smiled at him like that for the first time, he said,

“Do you want to go outside?”

Louis had spent the first several minutes kicking around a football, because the only way knew how to flirt with anyone was by showing off. Harry had tried to get involved but his clothes were too nice and he was also just not very good. A lot of other boys were out on the ground. Fortunately many of them were younger and they didn’t seem to know who Harry was or what they were doing. They could get lost in the crowd; they could get lost anywhere when they wanted to. Louis hadn’t really known what they were doing either.

After about an hour wandering the grounds - Harry asking tons of questions about where Louis came from, his family, his life before here; Louis doing his best to avoid them while asking Harry all kinds of ridiculous questions about being rich (How many cars do you have? What’s your favorite caviar?) – Harry led them to a side entrance to the school. He said it’d let Louis back in close to his room, though Louis hadn’t been to this entrance before. Before Louis could say something ridiculous and dismissive, as he was surely preparing to do, Harry leaned against the cold stone of the school and gave Louis that one particular smile again. Louis was struck with the ridiculous thought that this wasn’t a good enough story to tell Zayn yet, so he stepped in, grabbed Harry by the waist with one hand and kissed him. Harry leaned down into it gently, and just as Louis pulled away, moved to duck into the school and push aside that any of this had ever even happened, Harry said,

“I’ll come find you tomorrow.”

So, it was just like that. Louis assumed this was about as easy and natural as everything that happened in Harry’s life. It was definitely as fraught and complicated as anything that happened in his. Harry was the first boy Louis had ever been with.

He never asked Harry who he’d been with before, because he didn’t want to know the answer. The first time was so spontaneous it was practically an accident, cramped into some tiny storage space that used to be a pantry or a cook’s bedroom or something hid away behind the kitchen in the basement of the school. Louis’s family had been to visit earlier that morning, and he almost hadn’t shown up. When he got there, he fell into Harry the way he did almost any time they met now; it just happened. When they’d finished, Harry curled up and giggling underneath him, Louis felt like he’d come out of a daze, the way you feel when the lights go up at the movies. He’d thought he was going to panic; he knew he got very close. But Harry didn’t notice, or else he acted like he didn’t anyway, because all he did was throw a huge blanket he’d pulled from out of a closet around the two of them, pulled Louis the rest of the way to the ground, curled up against him, and started drawing slow circles on his stomach. Louis’s breathing slowed then and he had the horrible, gut punch of a realization that this was the happiest he’d been in months and probably years. He remembered trying to hold onto the feeling of that aftermath as long as he could, the same way he was always trying to hold onto his own attention.

It was two in the morning and technically November first. The tip of Harry’s nose and his lips rested on Louis’s shoulder blades, his sweat soaked hair pooled onto Louis’s neck. Their hands were intertwined, Harry’s elbows pressed into the mattress just outside of Louis’s. He breathed heavily, his stomach gently touching Louis’s lower back with every gulp, and Louis was able to match his own breathing to it the way he was so used to doing when he was too anxious to breathe. Louis fell to the bed first so Harry could, too. He laid across Louis’s back so his head rested on the pillow over his right shoulder, and he pulled a blanket up around them like he did that first time, right over their heads, blocking out the rest of the world. If Louis got totally buried in the smother of the blanket and the weight of Harry resting on top of him, he’d be fine with that, fine with that until the end of fucking time.

“I love you so much,” Harry said, his breath still ragged, hot on Louis’s face.

Louis dragged a hand up from where it was pinned underneath him and wiped a bead of sweat that was traveling down Harry’s temple towards his mouth. Harry smiled that smile again, the one that was born from nothing and dedicated just to him, and the corners of it pressed up against Louis’s finger. His heart caught in his throat and his words spilled out before he could grab hold of them, a wave, several waves, crashing, withdrawing, pushing you out, pulling you back in.

“I believe you.”


	10. November 20th 1966 – 5:01PM

It had been four months since Ashton and the boys had been anywhere alone. Whether it was one straggler from Niall’s crew or a whole room full of fellow residents, Ashton couldn’t rub three moments he’d shared with just the group of them together to make a fourth.

He suspected that he knew the reason why. After all, he’d had several nice moments with Calum and Luke, and he’d seen Calum, Luke, and Michael laughing together on the way to meet him and the others, so there was really only one thing it could be, and he woke up this morning ready to deal with it.

He told Michael they’d all meet up for dinner at five that night; he told Calum and Luke five thirty. Michael was only a few minutes late to meet him.

“Where’s everyone else?” Michael asked as soon as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

“You’re still mad at me?” Michael didn’t like being big brothered. Calum and Luke very much did. Michael always had to be different. So, Ashton approached him different. It was, ironically, a very big brother thing to do.

“I don’t really give a shit. Is this an intervention?”

“Nope.” Like Ashton was some kind of idiot. “This is us going to steal desserts from the kitchen.”

Michael weighed the pluses and minuses carefully before responding; Ashton could see it in his eyes. But he always knew, between sweets and anger, for Michael, which one would win.

“Okay.”

Ashton could find his way into or out of any place. It’s what he’d started to hint at months ago when he first told Niall the story of how he’d gotten sent to his first children’s mental home. Ashton had been afraid Niall was going to see that as an opportunity, but mostly Niall saw it as a fascination. Sometimes when boys are orphans they end up feeing isolated, anti-social and alone. Niall was the opposite – he’d turned the variety of people, places, and experiences that had made up his seventeen years thus far into good stories and even better friends. He liked to learn from people, and he was himself, at this point, a wealth of useful knowledge. Not the sort you can pick up in school; the sort that made Ashton an expert at breaking into and out of anywhere. Niall wasn’t interested in being opportunistic with Ashton. He was interested in learning that skill all his own.

Their first target had been the kitchen, because Niall had similar priorities as Michael. It had been midnight some day not long after Halloween and Niall has simply not gotten enough to eat at dinner. There weren’t many of those nights here, something for which both Ashton and Niall were eternally grateful. But there had been an internal drama between Louis and Liam and Zayn that Ashton hadn’t quite picked up on, and it had led Niall out of the dining hall well before he’d gotten his fill. He wasn’t upset about it. But by midnight he was more than ready to steal some fruit.

“So, how do we get in there?” Michael said. “Isn’t everybody in there fixing dinner.”

“No, you’ve got it all wrong.” Ashton was leading them down the stairs past the classroom where they’d gotten their orientation. “They prepare the food starting at four. Well probably before that, probably closer to three thirty, but four is when they start to cook. I know because Luke and I have our physicals every other week just above the kitchen, and you can always smell it through the ventilation.”

He took a second to recount the turns they’d passed since they got down the stairs and confirmed they were on the right one before leading Michael down it. They passed a few boys on the way and Ashton gave them a wave.

“Helping clean up again, Ash?” one of them called.

“Just trying to make a good impression, Rich.”

“Who the fuck is Rich?” Michael said, not at all quietly.

“A very friendly cover story. Here.” He pushed Michael into a closet at the end of the hall filled with mops, rags, and cleaning fluid.

“Ugh,” Michael said, covering his face to mute the smell.

“Just give me one second.”

“If you wanted to apologize, you should have just done it,” said Michael. “I don’t know how effective getting me poisoned is in that capacity.”

“I’m not apologizing you, Mike,” said Ashton. “I don’t have anything to apologize for.” He was knocking along the inside walls of the closet, waiting for a hollowed sound to come back to him, but Michael wasn’t making hearing anything in this confined space very easy.

“What the fuck, man? What the fuck do you mean, you’re not gonna apologize. You left me alone. That fucking sucked.”

“Well, sometimes things suck. That doesn’t mean they’re not necessary.” He thought he heard the right sound along the right wall, but he couldn’t be sure, and he never remembered if it was the right wall or along the back.

“Yeah, sure, things suck, but we don’t have to do shitty things to each other and make all the other shitty things worse.”

“You know as well as I do that Luke wouldn’t have been able to handle living with a stranger. He likes Cal. You don’t like any people at all. So, what’s the fucking difference to you?”

“I like Cal,” Michael said, defensively. Ashton felt bad. That wasn’t what he’d meant. If Michael would just let him listen for half a second – “Why do you have such a fucking huge problem with that?”

“Michael, shut up for a second, okay? People are gonna hear us in the hall.”

Michael wasn’t listening. “Ever since Luke came along you’re playing fucking matchmaker with the two of them like I don’t fucking matter at all. Like Cal and I weren’t friends first. If you want Luke to have a friend so bad, if you like Luke so god damn much, YOU suck his dick, then, and stop making Cal do it.”

“I’m not making Cal do a fucking thing, Michael!” Don’t shout. “Cal became friends with Luke all on his own. It was my fucking intention to take care of Luke by myself. I had it handled. They like each other. Why can’t your friends have more than one friend? And what do you have against the kid anyway? He’s literally never done anything to you. I’m just trying to get us. Through this. Together.”

For better or worse, it shut Michael up. He turned back to the walls and finally found the spot he was looking for, just at the corner of the back wall and the right one. He slide his hand down the seam of the wall and found the piece of plywood that slid out of place from the rest of the wall revealing a handle or at the very least a gap in the wall where you could grip the makeshift door. He gave it a few good pulls and the whole panel slid to the left a foot, two, three, revealing a dimly lit hall behind it.

“Servant’s quarters,” he said by way of unenthusiastic explanation to Michael, and ducked inside.

Michael would follow him or he wouldn’t. That was him and Michael in a nutshell. Even before Luke, even before Calum, Ashton would also do his utmost to make Michael feel like he had a friend, and Michael would always decide when he wanted a friend and when he didn’t. When he and Niall chatted about their individual groups of friends, Niall said he thought Michael and Zayn were similar that way, but Ashton didn’t think so. From what he could tell, Zayn didn’t really have a choice when he wanted people around or when he didn’t. It sounded like the feeling took him over more than anything. With Michael it was a science, a chemistry, an orchestra he was carefully conducting. Ashton couldn’t always tell what the end result was Michael was going for; he couldn’t always hear the music Michael was hearing, and so he could never really help the way he could help the others. Only Michael knew when Michael needed a friend. Only Michael knew what kind of careful balancing act he was enacting between pleasantly occupied and overwhelmed, between relaxing seclusion and being totally alone.

By the time Ashton got to the bend in the secret hall he could identify Michael’s footsteps behind him. He slowed down so Michael could catch up.

“We don’t have servants,” Michael said.

“No, but it’s a castle. Or a manor or something. It used to have rich people and not crazy underage boys is the point. And rich people have servants. Servants they don’t want their guests to see.”

“That’s gross.”

“I know. They have these secret passages and hidden quarters so they could live here full time to cook, clean, whatever, and no one would ever know they were here if they didn’t want to. Just whole communities of people down here in the basements, the people upstairs just assuming I don’t know what, that their food was made by magicians.”

“Super gross.”

“I know. But it’s what’s gonna get us entire pies to take back to the boys.”

“So we are meeting up with them.”

“Of course we are. I haven’t gotten to spend time with you guys in months. It was starting to kill me.”

Ashton said it before he realized it was true. He suspected the other boys thought they were something for him to be preoccupied with, a way for him to bide his time until he got to live the real life they might never be able to. The truth was, they were saving him. Niall and the others were great, loads of fun. But they weren’t these three boys. Most days Ashton didn’t know what he’d do if any of them got out of here. He didn’t know what he’d do if he got out alone.

Michael was too decent or else too awkward to say anything in response to that, so he just followed along behind Ashton quietly which, for him, was a huge kindness. Ashton led them into another hallway full of small, abandoned bedrooms, some used as storage, others with their bedroom furniture still in them. Stark, plain, wood and white. Ashton had no hard time relating to these kinds of living quarters, and it occurred to him for the first time just how similar it was, his boys and these old servants from times past. Both in rooms like these, shut up somewhere so nicer, wealthier, easier people could conveniently forget that they were around.

He glanced back at Michael who seemed transfixed by a small, square set of drawers next to a single sized cot in an otherwise empty room, his feet dragging, slowing him down as they passed it. He was probably thinking exactly what Ashton just was, and this was why Michael was probably his best friend of the four of them. He saw the same things Ashton did wherever they looked.

Ashton watched him a second too long and Michael caught him, looked self conscious and a bit guilty.

“You thinking what I’m thinking, Mikey?”

“That they better have a fuck ton of pies to make up for this?”

Ashton smiled. “Yeah. Exactly that. Kitchen’s round here.”

Michael, now anxious, followed closely behind him.

“Okay, but you’re sure no one’s going to be in here?”

“I’m telling you, they’re done cooking by five. Then they leave the stuff there to sit in warming trays until quarter to six when they ring the dinner bell. I mean have you tasted the food, Mikey? I mean really tasted it? I know it’s hard because compared to the boxed, frozen garbage we ate at the last place it’s practically the stuff of royalty. But it’s stale as all shit. Besides, this place is understaffed. The same people cook the food as set up the dining hall for meal time, so they’ve got to get it done first, then go upstairs to set the plates and cups and stuff at the food line. Trust me.” He laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I know what I’m talking about. I always do.”

And he backed them through the kitchen door. He could tell by the look on Michael’s face that he’d been right, but he swung around anyway to confirm it. The kitchen was in fact empty, empty save for the piles and trays of steaming warm food waiting to make its way upstairs within the next half hour.

Michael looked like it was Christmas morning, and he almost went straight for the rolls stacked on the counter to his right.

“Nope.” He caught him by the elbow. “We don’t take the food about to be served. Then we’re just fucking over all the hungry kids who need dinner. No, we’re looking for the fridge. For the stuff they’re gonna serve end of the week. Then all they’ll do is assume they miscalculated and replace it before anyone else is deprived. Ethical theft only, Mikey. Come on this way.”

Ashton yanked open the heavy walk-in fridge door and headed to the back where the next door led to the freezer. Michael shivered as Ashton led them in and the two of them started browsing shelves.

“Ethical Theft would make a good band name,” Michael muttered, looking over the label on a loaf of uncooked bread.

“Too true.”

“You think Cal’s doing okay in here?”

“Yeah,” said Ash, “I think he and Luke are doing fine.”

“You ever think,” he started, but trailed off. Ashton glanced over and couldn’t tell if this was something hard for him to say or if he was just really distracted by a package of frozen chicken. Then he went on. “You ever think a person can get TOO okay in here? Like too…too comfortable?”

“Like too used to living in institutions?”

“Yeah.”

Ashton didn’t even have to think about that. “Yes. I really do.”

Michael nodded at a steak he’d found. “Sometimes I think that’s happened to me.” He held up the steak to Ashton. “This isn’t for us, is it?”

“No,” Ashton said with a chuckle. “It’s really not.”

“The thing is,” said Michael, returning the steak and moving down the line to where Ashton was collecting frozen pies, “I don’t want that to happen to Cal. Luke either. They’re good people. I’m maybe not such good people. You…” He chuckled. “You I can’t decide.”

“Yeah, well.” Ashton slapped an armful of frozen cream pies into Michael’s waiting arms. “I can’t decide either.”

He headed to the other side to look for frozen whipped cream.

“So, are you gonna do it?”

Ashton had been waiting over a year for this. He tried to just breathe through it. Funny he had come here to resolve a fight they had had earlier, not start a whole brand new one.

“Do what?”

“Can’t shit a shitter, Ash.”

“No.”

“Why not?” He wasn’t angry. Or he didn’t sound it. At least that was a good sign. At least maybe he was willing to try to understand where Ashton was coming from this time instead of screaming at him from down a hall, making him cry and not talking to him for months.

“Because there’s no way of knowing what’s out there for them.” He took another deep breath. “Why’d you think I was so upset about doing it the first time? You don’t think I thought it’d feel good to get those boys away from the monsters who were supposed to be taking care of them?” Michael didn’t answer, but he did hold his eye, which was rare from Michael in any situation. He must have known this was a very important conversation. “What kind of job do you think Luke is gonna get not being able to say a word or look a person in the eye? And what about Cal? Jesus Christ, Michael, what about Cal? If he spends the rest of his life a-fucking-lone it’d be the best god damn possible outcome. He’s not Louis, man. He ain’t got a rich boyfriend to fly him out to San Francisco where, by the way, they’re still being fucking dragged into the street by police and beat the shit out of.”

Don’t shout. People were going to be back down here to start serving dinner soon.

“I know they can’t stay in here,” Ash said. He didn’t need Mikey to say it. He saw it in his eyes. Ashton was a scaredy cat. Ashton was the reason they’d all stay inside. “But I don’t have any answer, Mikey. I don’t have an answer, and I need your help. I’m sorry for sending you off to live with some stranger. Do you accept my apology?”

Michael nodded because it seemed like all he could manage right now. Ashton became acutely re-aware that they were in a freezer.

“Let’s bring these back up to the boys, yeah?”

Michael nodded again. They left everything else exactly as they’d found it.

Back through the kitchen, down the hall of identical rooms, Michael caught Ashton’s eye again. By the time they got to the secret entrance back into the storage closet their steps were perfectly in line. Michael jostled the door open and grabbed a bucket and rags from the closet to hide the pies in. Ashton carried it past Rich’s room, stopping in to wave hi with a rag in hand just for good measure. They met Cal and Luke at the bottom of the stairs ten minutes later.

“Hey.” Calum sounded almost breathless. “I’m so glad we’re doing this. We haven’t had a lot of time, and Luke and I really have something we want to talk to you guys about.”

“Yeah, I think we do, too,” Ashton said, a swelling sense of something bigger than himself filling his stomach and pressing into his lungs making it a little hard to breathe. He glanced at Michael; Michael smiled and nodded his head. That made it feel a little easier. “We’re all gonna get out of here.”

 

That night as Niall carefully sliced pieces of frozen key lime pie into paper plates and balanced them onto the radiator to defrost, the boys started to discuss their plan. Ashton was a no man left behind kind of guy and Niall respected that about him. He’d come back to their room, fully armed with the other three boys, right after dinner and pulled him into the scheme. Right now it was unclear – some might have to test out, some would have to escape; no one could be quite sure that everyone would make it. And Niall felt a distinct pang of guilt as his friend Louis was the one person who could really grease the wheels so to speak on this situation, but he was the one, for once, being quietest. He just sat on the other side of the radiator stirring a tub of whipped cream he’d defrosted to perfection telling Liam he couldn’t let it sit or it’d burn in the fake accent of a fancy French chef.

“It all comes down to one thing, though,” Ashton was saying, “and I can’t emphasize this enough. You have to have a plan of where you’re gonna go and what you’re gonna do, okay? There are three visitations between now and next summer when we’d have to re-sign for next term. Christmas, early spring, and first day of summer. If you’ve got people you think can help you on the outside, get them on the visitor’s roster and start planning now. I don’t give a shit if it’s some random guy who can get you a job as a paper boy. Put him down as Uncle Random Guy and get him the fuck in.”

“We pool our resources, too, boys,” said Niall, passing another slice of pie to Zayn who accepted it with wide eyes. “Rule’s a rule. You know someone who can help someone else or you got parents who’ll take someone else in, you do it. No questions asked.”

“Of course, Niall,” Liam said. Liam hadn’t had a piece of pie yet. He was just picking off Louis’s and Zayn’s. Niall had no doubt that Liam of all people understood this rule.

“Yeah, and I got something to add to that as well,” said Michael. “We hold each other up and pool our resources and all that shit. But if one of you motherfuckers fucks up –“ The room got a little quieter as the casual banter died down. “ – then you fuck it up for the rest of us. If one of you fucks can’t pull your weight or get scared or get fucking lazy about – if you think that’s you – then fuck the fuck off right now. Don’t even get into it. You guys are fine and you’ve got some bitching fucking records, but if you’re the reason me or Cal or Ash or Luke don’t get out of this place then I’ll just fucking kill you. Simple as that.”

It was the first time it occurred to many of them that they were planning something more serious than a football match. Even Niall had to admit he hadn’t really thought of it that way before now. Maybe he just hadn’t thought they were really going to do it; maybe he thought they’d chicken out before it came time to pull the trigger. But now, Michael’s words served as strangely bolstering to the group. He looked at Liam, then Zayn, and finally Louis and thought about why they’d never made this pact before. Maybe Ashton’s escape artist abilities were what sealed the deal, that was fine. But it still didn’t excuse why they never had the conversation.

Liam would go along with anything the others did because he wanted to be supportive. Zayn would go along with anything the others did because he didn’t want to make the decision himself. There was one squeaky wheel here, and it was Louis that Niall was looking at now.

“Well. What’s it gonna be?”

Liam and Zayn always joked around and called Niall and Louis mum and dad. Niall was dad, probably because he always had a fun game for everyone to play or a, as Michael put it, bitching record, or an inappropriate joke. Niall was easily likeable and he knew it. Ashton had being an escape artist that got him through all those years in home after home. And Niall had this.

But Louis was the heart of them all. Louis was the core of the four of them here in this place. Louis was easy and hard. He was funny and sad. He was brilliant and he was an idiotic piece of shit. He was vile to people sometimes, and he was also the most solidly decent and loyal person Niall had ever met, and Niall had met a whole shit load of people in the years since his parents died in a spinning car in a winter storm. Louis was everything they loved about each other and everything they hated, too. Louis wasn’t idealistic, he was real. He might not always tell you what you wanted to hear, he might be an overwhelmed mess of a person who just wanted a little moment of reprieve before he went crazy from the pressure of simply being himself, alive. But they wouldn’t be here in this room eating reheated key lime pie without him. He’d be the first person to shoot down a plan like this for his own selfish, shitty reasons. And he was the only person they’d ever follow into a plan like this in the first place.

As Niall looked at him, Louis sighed. Niall could read in his expression that he was tired of it coming down to this, all of this – his decisions, his illness, his own self in his body in this place, all of which he mostly hated but couldn’t shake. Niall saw the defeat in his eyes that served as acceptance. He read it easily, the way you read something written in your first language. They all read each other’s faces for truth, whether it was an easy truth or not. All he could do was wait. Wait to see what version of himself Louis wanted to be today. Wait to see if his better angels would fire his louder ones out.

He sighed again.

“I’ll do my best. That’s all I’m saying about it.”

Quiet cheers flooded through the group. Zayn pulled Liam into a friendly headlock. Before the celebrations could go too far, though, Louis was on his feet, leaving his carefully cultivated culinary achievement to steam on the radiator pipes. He stepped over Liam and Zayn and reached for the sweatshirt he’d discarded on Niall’s bed, all without a word, until just before he headed to the door when he caught Michael’s eye.

“Hey.”

Michael looked vaguely terrified. And Niall knew it was rightfully so.

“You even _think_ about them the wrong way, and I’ll make sure you fucking die here. We cool?”

But he walked out the door before Michael could answer.


	11. December 10th, 1966 – 3:17AM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adding two chapters today, because I hadn't posted all weekend. Soz!

When Zayn had gone to bed at an early eight PM the night before he had been able to see all the faded greens and dying reds and yellows straight through to the woods and to the dark blue sky beyond. When he awoke ten minutes ago, the whole world was frozen and white.

About six inches of snow covered the ground now, untouched as all the boys were snug and protected in the safety of lights out. Even the personnel must have been hiding out from the bluster and cold; there wasn’t a footprint out there to mar it. Snow clung to fragile stems and branches coating each tree like spilled icing. He flicked on a light, but the warm glow from his lamps reflected off the glass back at him. Trying to help illuminate the yard only kept the beauty from getting to him. Zayn could only see it in the dark.

So he sat there with the lights out until he started to feel like he was potentially the only person left in the entire world – just him, this building, the night time, the snow. He knew when he started to feel like that he was supposed to reach out to someone because he and Dr. Heiman had talked about it just this morning. And though he also knew the fall was inevitable no matter how much advice they gave him, he felt obligated to at least give it a try. Unfortunately it was just past three in the morning, so there weren’t many people to reach out to. Fortunately, he could still think of one.

Zayn shuffled down the downstairs hall in combat boots pulled over sweatpants and a nice wool coat his father had given him shoved over one of Liam’s old sweatshirts. One hand tugged on a knit cap trying to get it just right over his ears, the other clutched a lighter and a small leather pouch in his pocket. He had in his other pocket a wedge of wood to prop the outside door open. There were so many illegal things happening on his person at once, it was hard to keep track of them.

They didn’t lock the doors here. It wasn’t allowed. So when he got to the room he was headed for, he just turned the knob, gave the door a gentle nudge, poked his head in, and whispered.

“Hey, you up?”

Liam’s loud snores answered his question before its intended recipient could. But his response shortly followed.

“I’m rooming with a hair dryer, Zayn, what the fuck do you think?”

“Come outside and smoke?”

There was a short pause.

“One sec.”

Louis came out of his room a few minutes later in his own, cheaper wool coat, hood pulled up over some truly impressive bedhead and his feet in some flimsy trainers.

“You looked outside, didn’t you?” said Zayn.

“What are we, walking to the next county? We’re stepping outside a door.”

“It’s cold, man.”

“Well, these are the only shoes I’ve got that aren’t Brooks Brothers knock offs, okay?”

He was walking a little ahead of Zayn, which meant he was mad at him, which meant he’d noticed Zayn’s downswing lately. So Zayn let the shoe thing slide. He sped up partially to spite Louis and partially because he didn’t want to walk alone.

They headed for their usual spot – this door off some rarely used hallway that led the back way to Louis’s room. It had been Louis’s suggestion. Louis budged it open, and Zayn propped it with his confiscated piece of wood. They brushed some snow off the steps and sat. Zayn pulled out his leather pouch containing the pot his cousin snuck in for him every couple of months and some sheets torn from the Bible to roll it in. Louis rested his head on his arms folded on his knees and watched the snow fall softly in giant flakes in front of them. His eyes were alarmingly blue even in pitch darkness; Zayn always newly noticed that when they got time alone together. The only sound around them was nature’s white noise, and then, the flick of Zayn’s lighter.

“So why are you awake?”

“Generalized anxiety disorder,” said Louis. “Why are you?”

Zayn shrugged. “Can’t sleep.”

Louis made the sound of a game show buzzer. “Wrong answer.”

Zayn passed him the joint to shut him up. “Don’t gotta be a dick about it, man.”

“I’m not being a dick, I’m just being honest.”

“That’s the excuse dicks usually use when they want to say mean shit.”

“Stop saying ‘dick’.”

Zayn tried changing the subject. “Did Liam give you those poems he wrote the other day? He’s really fucking proud of them, it’s nice.”

“I don’t know. He might have. I didn’t look at them yet.”

“He really wants you to. You should.”

“Well, I’ll put it at the end of my other fucking homework assignments, Zayn.”

“Man, seriously. Why’d you even come out here, you were gonna be like this?”

“Well,” said Louis, way too loud for the hour or the location or the drugs they had on them on the grounds of a mental institution, “thought it might be the last time I’d see you for a few weeks so I figured what the hell.”

Zayn had to steady himself on a long drag from their joint. His joint. Whatever. He couldn’t ever decide between angry and sad in these situations, which landed him usually somewhere on the spectrum of confused. He felt guilty and defiant all at the same time. He wanted to hit Louis in the face and to hug him. Zayn was almost always of two minds about most things.

Before he could figure out what to do, just as he was on the brink of walking away simply for the ease of it, out of the corner of his eye he saw Louis drop his face into his hands, smoke billowing out between his fingers as he exhaled.

“I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault.”

He was so quiet Zayn could barely hear him. This was not Louis. Not the usual one, anyway. Which meant Louis was about seven days away from a total fucking break. Zayn prayed – actually prayed for once in his stupid, godless life – that he’d either be able to hold off or else make it back in time to be there for him. Christmas was a terrible time of year for Louis. Seeing his sisters, to him, was pretty much just leaving them again. And Harry was always away.

“I miss you when I’m gone.”

“Then why do you fucking go?” He was still talking to the palms of his hands.

Zayn shook his head, more for the comfort of the motion than the meaning. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“And Liam visits you.”

Zayn didn’t know what he meant by that. “You can visit me, too.”

Louis scoffed. “Yeah I’ll sit in the corner and watch.”

Zayn rolled his eyes. “What the hell you think we’re doing in there?”

“Shit I never wanna see Liam do.”

“Lou – “

“That’s not the fucking point. He likes it. That time with you I mean. I… don’t. I don’t know what to do with that you. You always look like you’re dying.”

Zayn was teetering back towards anger now. “Fine, then don’t come. Suit your damn self.”

“You don’t even want me there,” said Louis, his voice back to mixing with the gentle howl of the after midnight wind. “Neither of you do.”

Zayn held the joint out to Louis again. Louis was willfully ignoring it.

“I don’t know what I want, Louis. That’s the whole fucking point. I don’t feel anything.” He leaned in a little closer, dipping his head so he could see Louis’s face tucked into his arms. “Can you imagine that? Nothing at all?”

Louis grabbed the joint. “A bit.”

Zayn chuckled. “Nah, man. Not less. Nothing. Just total radio silence.”

Louis took a long drag and shook his head.

“I have no idea what that would feel like, Zayn.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Zayn laughed. “I know you wouldn’t. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you all the time.” Louis laughed wryly. “No, I’m serious. Sometimes I look forward to the breaks, even if I know I’m not supposed to. You and me? We don’t make a whole lot of sense as best friends.” Louis looked at him hard, a challenge, a perpetual one between them to be the first to break off their friendship for good, one that would probably go unanswered to the end of time. “Funny that we are anyway then, huh?”

Louis’s eyes sparkled their particular brand of bright sadness. He had such a way of embodying both energy and melancholy all at once that sometimes Zayn wondered if he knew his best friend at all.

“You miss me a little, too, though, don’t you?” he said, a smile spread around the joint in his teeth.

Louis smiled in that same way. “Barely.”

Zayn nodded and took a drag. “How’s Harry?”

Louis shrugged. “He’s fine. He’s always fine.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t know. He’s not us.”

And Zayn could have cried just then. For a lot of shitty reasons. Because he was right. Because that, of all the things in the world, was what they had to form a friendship around. Because Louis thought being sick was so definitive of who you were as a person that people who weren’t could never really know you. Because he might be right about that. Mostly, though, probably because he said “us” even when he was mad at him, even when he knew Zayn was about to go down one of his dark holes without him, and because Zayn felt that way, too, and he knew how badly he was going to miss him, this time maybe even more than the other times, every time more than the last, and because there was nothing at all in the whole world he could do about it.

“I’ll tell Liam not to come. He can stay with you.”

“He won’t listen,” Louis answered quickly, like he had anticipated it.

“Then he’ll stay with me. And you can have Harry.”

“You need to be alone. And Harry’s just gonna bug me about leaving.”

“Leaving?” Zayn raised an eyebrow, interested. “You tell him about that orphan kid’s plans?”

Louis shook his head – of course not. “No, he’s been talking about that for a while.”

“About leaving?”

“About me leaving.”

Something inside Zayn sunk from his head to his stomach. He could have choked on it.

“You gonna?”

Louis didn’t answer, not for the longest time. Not until he’d reached for the joint one last time, until he’d put it out on the pavement and tucked it into his coat pocket where he always kept the evidence. Not until snow had fallen all around them, encircling them in a dusting of white, the only clear and warm places on the whole of the grounds it seemed the two spots on which Zayn and Louis sat. He didn’t answer as he ran a hand through his hair, pushing the hood back on his face to reveal bags under his eyes and shaking fingers still rested on his forehead. He didn’t answer until he got up to go back inside.

“Come back faster this time, okay?” he said.

Zayn nodded. It was a lie, but it was the only thing he could remember how to do.

Louis nodded, too. And they went in together.


	12. December 24th, 1966 – 10:10AM

The truth was Ashton hadn’t expected it to hit him this hard.

After seventeen years of days just like this, snow gently falling outside picture windows, trees decorated with sparkling lights, laughing families walking through the streets with last minute packages and Christmas hams. After seventeen years of watching things he’d never had, this was one of the only times he felt inexplicably nostalgic for it.

Angry, sure. He spent the ages of nine to thirteen solidly believing his life was cursed and unfair. Frustrated, definitely yeah. Wanting to be able to participate in things he couldn’t, not being able to understand at the ages of seven and eight why he wasn’t able to, what made him so different. Lonely. Yeah, definitely that. Lonely happened a lot in these most recent years in the home when his boys had family to stop in and visit.

But there was something different this year, perched up next to Niall on the decorative tables to the side of the great mantel and fireplace in the great hall. What could he be missing when he’d never had this before? Maybe this was the first year there was possibility. Maybe he had a vision in his head that he couldn’t shake of a tiny apartment somewhere in North London with hardly enough rooms to hold them, with radiators that needed constant maintenance and scarves that needed to be worn indoors. Of nearly dead Christmas trees decorated with care and gifts that were inexpensive or free but had great personal value or hinted at some inside joke they’d carried over with them from the group home. Maybe this wasn’t nostalgia, not exactly. Maybe it was longing. Not for something other people had, but for something he could have. Something that was completely his own.

He watched Niall watch Liam allow his parents to dote over him, his mother fluffing his hair and his dad telling him all the special features of the watch they’d gotten him as a present. His own eyes caught Louis streak by with two identical blonde girls in matching red Christmas sweaters hanging off him precariously as he shouted loudly about finding cookies before Santa was due to come. Two older girls followed behind him, one giggling, the other calling after him not to break their sisters. Ashton had already lost his boys in the crowd.

“You miss it?” Niall said.

Ashton was so consumed by their surroundings he jumped at the sound of him. “Uh, no. I never really had it. You?”

“I hardly remember it,” Niall said. “But yeah.”

Ashton still watched Louis, now getting scolded by his oldest sister as one of the twins rubbed her elbow, having bumped it. She still smiled, though.

“You think they’ll go back to their families?” he asked, not even sure Niall was still listening. In fact Niall took several moments to answer.

“Some of them I hope so,” he said, simply, like he were trying to predict the end of a novel. “Some of them… I don’t know.”

“Some of them what?”

Niall shook his head, now watching the same thing Ashton had been before he was transfixed by Niall’s unexpectedly thoughtful response.

“Some of them I don’t think should have been in here in the first place.” He sighed. “There’s the chance this place makes it worse, you know. There’s the chance,” he said, “that you wouldn’t have known anything was all that wrong with you you didn’t have someone telling you so every damn day.”

Ashton thought of the exceptional strength he’d always thought Calum had to be such a good sport about being in a place like this over some way he was born and some backwards idea the last generation had about it. He thought of the brightness in Luke’s eyes, the expressiveness, how there was never any doubt to Ashton what he was thinking or saying even if he was saying nothing at all. He thought, _this is why we’re getting out of here_ , and suddenly it wasn’t as important if he got his apartment with his Christmas tree and his comically ineffectual heating. It didn’t matter as long as the others got the endings they were looking for.

He and Niall would make their own way, anyway, wouldn’t they? After all that’s exactly what they’d been doing for a decade or more.

“I got a friend who works on the docks in Ireland. Wrote to him a few months ago to check in, he wrote back right away,” said Niall. “Good guy. Real solid. Got a girl pregnant, but she’s great. Works at the library I think herself. Sent a picture of the baby sitting right out there on the docks with him, his girl took it so it’s all blurry. Real nice people.” He thought on that for a second. “Anyway, he gave me a job several years back. Figure he could do the same for a few of us, if that’s something you’d ever consider taking up.”

Ashton smiled. “Ireland, eh?”

Niall smiled back. “Best country in the world.”

Ashton made a noncommittal noise and shrugged. Niall laughed.

“Well, give it a thought.”

“I will.”

Over the course of the next hour sat like holiday decorations on top of the furniture, Ashton caught sight of all three of his boys and their families, and for the most part he sort of wished that he hadn’t. Luke was sat awkwardly while his mother mediated an argument between his older brother and his father that somehow seemed to regularly devolve into less than playful punches on Luke’s arm. Mikey was locked in an epic argument with his dad that Ashton overheard was about “disappointing his mother” because pretty much the whole room could hear that the way he was shouting. And Calum was sat between his two parents in silence. His dad was literally reading the paper. Ashton’s thoughts wandered back to his and Niall’s room a few nights ago, blasting “Please Please Me” full volume on Niall’s record player, Calum and Mikey jumping on the bed until an orderly came in and politely but forcefully told them to keep it down.

He turned to Niall. “Families are only here for Christmas Eve, right?”

Niall nodded. “Til dinner.”

Ashton nodded back. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Niall peered at him out of the corner of his eye. “My stealing days are over, Irwin. I’m a changed man.”

Ashton shrugged. “So are my breaking and entering days, Niall. I swear.”

Niall started to smirk. “How fast can you cook a chicken?”

Ashton shook his head, already jumping down from the table. “Pre-cooked ham, my friend. Don’t be a fucking amateur.”

And he led Niall down the back stairs to the kitchen.


	13. December 25th, 1966 – 2:52PM

Niall’s room was covered wall to wall in newspaper, greasy napkins and laughter. Liam watched Calum open his third gift of the evening, which was a single biscuit nicked from the Christmas Eve dinner thrown for all the families the night before.

“Michael!” he exclaimed louder than Liam had ever heard him shout before, and he tipped over into Michael in what was maybe a hug, maybe a tackle, maybe something entirely their own.

“I know you!” Michael was repeating between giggles. “I know you so well!”

Louis was taking extra care to cultivate the mashed potatoes he’d been brewing for the better part of an hour. They were boxed, but seasoned to perfection, and somehow just as rich and thick as the ones Liam’s mum made from scratch at home. Every now and then he’d open a present from someone (Liam had given him a poem he’d written which Louis promptly made up a messy melody for on Niall’s guitar). But mostly he stared thoughtfully into his concoction and stayed suspiciously quiet.

Liam wondered if he was thinking of the same thing he was. Conversely, he wondered if he would be mad if he knew what Liam was thinking. With Louis, it almost always depended on the day.

“Hey.”

Calum had dropped down next to Liam without him noticing. Last Liam had checked in he was still tackling Michael to the floor.

“Hello,” Liam said brightly. “Can I fix your collar?”

“Yes, you may.”

“Thanks.” And Liam straightened it. “Thank you,” he said again.

“I got you a present,” said Calum. “It’s simple, but I hope you like it.”

Liam’s face felt flush, and he was sure he’d turned a bright shade of red. He hadn’t even thought about getting Ashton and his boys any gifts. They hadn’t talked about getting gifts at all, what with the lack of money and access to the outside world. The ones they’d gotten were just silly gestures between each other, little inside jokes.

Calum smiled. He could probably tell Liam didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to get me anything in return,” he said. “Actually I didn’t even get it for you. I just…acquired it and thought it probably belonged to you.”

“Okay,” Liam said, still a bit lost for words, and he took the small package in his hands. It was light as a feather. He shook it as a joke. “Hm.”

It wasn’t wrapping at all, but a picture folded up to look like a gift and taped gently closed. When Liam unfolded it at first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Then, in a strange sort of out of body moment, he recognized a scar he had on the back of his right knuckle that he’d gotten falling down the cement steps in his old family home. It was a drawing of his own hands.

“What is this?” he said.

“Zayn did it,” said Calum. “When we were all hanging out in the library back in November. He left it on the table, but I thought you should have it. Sorry to hold it on for so long and keep it secret.”

Now Liam really didn’t know what to say. He held the paper in his left hand and balanced his right over the drawing of it in pencil, trying to recreate the exact position it was in and figure out what he’d been doing while Zayn had been drawing it.

“You’re really good to your friends,” said Calum. “And they notice it. That was my only point.”

“Thank you,” said Liam, his stutter acting up and making it take about ten full seconds to say.

Calum smiled and rubbed his back, natural as if they’d been friends for several years. Then Michael screamed, “I know you,” again and dragged Calum back into the fray. Liam watched the two of them wrestle while Luke giggled and watched and Ashton provided color commentary.

Then he looked at Niall, huddled over his beat up, impossible to stay tuned guitar picking out Jingle Bells to the best of his ability and making himself chuckle. He looked at Louis pretending to tune the radio to get the Christmas station in better but really staring out the window, distracted. Calum was right. Liam never gave enough credit to the way each one of the four of them held each other up. And he put way too much pressure on Louis to be the one to fix things. So he grabbed up a paper plate and started slapping food onto it in heaping portions. Then he poured the hot chocolate they were brewing on the radiator into three foam cups. He’d caught Louis’s eye.

“What’re you doing?” he said quietly, removed. Louis had been removed a lot lately. It broke Liam’s heart.

He leaned down and kissed Louis on the forehead. Louis looked like he was dead torn between making fun of him and crying.

“Let’s get the band back together, yeah?”

Niall was already on his feet and helping Liam by relieving him of the hot chocolate. He still carried his guitar.

Louis didn’t look so certain, though the realization had certainly dawned on him by now. He watched Liam and Niall edge for the door, watched how they stood there and waited for him. Liam would stand here until he was ready to follow. He’d stand and wait even if he wasn’t ready til the next day. If Calum could see that, he was dead set on Louis figuring that out, too.

Louis stood up and followed.

Christmas celebrations must have been breaking out all over the grounds. Every couple of rooms burst with laughter or music. As progressive as this place wanted to be, it still so rarely sounded like this. For once it really did sound like a school for completely normal boys. Liam couldn’t help but beam at the sound of it, which he shared with Louis, dragging several feet behind him. Louis smiled back. He always did, even if Liam was sure Louis would mock his earnestness. Probably because if you asked Louis, he’d recall that he’d made fun of him. And maybe that is what he intended to do. But he never did. He just smiled back.

“You’d think Christmas would be a more high security time, if you know what I mean,” Niall said, himself smirking at the sounds of celebration.

“You just gotta give us a little freedom,” Liam said, and Niall nodded in agreement.

They got to Zayn’s door. It was guarded as always, which Liam had both expected and not. They slowed as they approached the assistant, each party sizing each other up, Liam distinctly aware of the sight they made decked out in instruments they weren’t supposed to own and radiator heated stolen food.

Liam considered carefully what to say, but all he could come up with was,

“It’s Christmas.”

The assistant waved them in.

The first thing Liam noticed was the window was open it’s allowed three inches. It wasn’t hard to miss as the temperature in the room must have been down to the low 50’s at most. Wasn’t this the kind of thing the guard outside was supposed to notice?

Before Liam and Niall could reconcile having their hands too full to help, Louis moved to the window, brushed the snow that blown inside off of the sill and shut it behind it. Liam finally laid the food onto Zayn’s night stand and fixed the covers around him, tugging them up to his chin that shivered with the chattering of his teeth. Niall brought him the hot chocolate, which surprisingly, Zayn accepted. Liam climbed into bed next to him; Niall pulled up a chair. Louis went to sit on a chair along the opposite wall of the room, clenching and unclenching a fist and watching on.

“Merry Christmas, Zaynie,” said Liam, moving the food from the night stand behind him to the one right in front of Zayn’s nose. Zayn watched the food land in front of him but didn’t touch it. “Niall’s learned Jingle Bells, but frankly it feels a little tone deaf right at the moment.”

“Yeah, if I had known you were trying to be an icicle in here I might have gone more towards White Christmas or Let It Snow,” said Niall. Zayn glanced at him, and at least his eyes laughed.

“Now, the ham is probably cold,” said Liam, “but Louis made potatoes, and they’re quite good. Also there’s apple pie and some asparagus, because everyone needs something green on their plate, even if we’re doing the cooking and not our mums.”

Zayn looked interested at the food and began to make a concession.

“Hey.”

He stopped to look at Louis. Liam prayed they wouldn’t fight.

“Say thank you to Liam.”

Zayn didn’t say anything.

“What are you, Luke? This was his idea. He brought you the food you’re about to eat. So, say thanks.”

“You don’t have to – “

“Thanks, Liam.”

It was an act of penance if Liam ever saw one. Zayn hardly ever said a word these last few times Liam had visited him in this state. So, doing so now was no easy feat. And just like that, with just those two words, Liam watched the guilt and pain wash down over Louis’s face, and he popped up from his chair, strode across the room, and plopped down cross-legged right in Zayn’s line of vision. Liam chuckled, thinking of how much more direct an approach it was than he himself usually took.

“Merry Christmas, you piece of shit,” said Louis. Liam watched a genuine smile tease at the corners of Zayn’s lips. “Your sisters say hi. The oldest one’s still hitting on Liam.” Zayn narrowed his eyes. “Eat this shitty ham, okay? You look like a fucking skeleton and it’s scary.”

Somewhere in all this, Liam had slid his hand onto Zayn’s back and started running it between his shoulder blades. It was an easy action and one he’d done plenty of times when he visited him like this. It didn’t occur to him until Louis noticed it that this was likely first time he’d ever seen Liam and Zayn this way, and just as that did occur to Liam, just as he snatched his hand off Zayn’s back just in case, Louis started to cry.

He buried his face in his hands. Liam sat up so he could see him over Zayn, but didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. That was Louis. Comfort him or leave him alone? You always thought it was one when it was supposed to be the other. It was over almost as fast as it had started. He gulped down one last sob, and removed his face from his hands, his eyes already red and streaked with tears. He wiped his eyes furiously, mad at himself, embarrassed, something else Liam didn’t know. Then, one more unexpected thing, he looked at Liam instead of Zayn.

“I’m scared,” he said. And just like that the whole damn thing clicked into place. Louis was not the sort of person Liam was supposed to understand. Truthfully, though, Louis was no ‘sort’ of person at all.

“I know,” Liam said, and he did. He really did.

“I don’t want to do it alone.”

“It’s not one or the other, Lou. It’s not that or your friends. It’s always your friends. Always the four of us. Always.”

“Yeah, but not in the moment, though. Then it’s me. Just me. With me. And I hate that, you know? I’m such a fucking confusing drag.”

“Don’t talk about my best friend like that.”

“What are you two on about?” said Niall.

“Oh nothing, Neil,” said Louis. “Liam’s just trying to peer pressure me into being an adult.”

Liam smirked that particular way he never really did until he became friends with Louis. “All the cool kids are doing it.”

Louis raised an eyebrow but still smiled. “Yeah you wish, Payno. You fucking wish.” He looked back at Zayn. “You okay, man?”

Zayn did something resembling a shrug. Louis got to his feet.

“You’re okay,” he said, then he leaned in close to Zayn’s face. “You’ll come back soon.” He leaned back up and pointed to the food. “Eat. Come on, Niall. We’re intruding.”

Liam caught the edge of Louis’s sweatshirt on his way past the bed and the two of them locked eyes. He could tell the smile Louis gave him then was mostly for show, but somewhere really deep, below the incoherency and mixed emotions that always clouded Louis’s world view, he believe that Louis knew Liam understood.

Because Liam was scared, too.

Every time he came to this room, he was scared. Scared of what he’d find, of what Zayn would be like this time. Scared of what he’d do and of how he’d feel once he’d done it and maybe not gotten anything back in return. The thing with life at this point was certain things started to feel inevitable. For one, they had to leave. He was as sure of this as he was that Niall had learned Jingle Bells on his un-tuned guitar in under fifteen minutes.

What Louis couldn’t handle, and what Liam knew to also be true, was that the more things become inevitable the more those things made other things you once held to be self evident seem unsure. Things as big and as important as who you were and how much you could count on your friends. See, when some things became certain, the main thing that started to fade was possibility. What Liam knew was that the disappearance of some possibilities, while sad, didn’t mean that more roads and chances wouldn’t pop up in front of each inevitability, each subsequent decision. But what scared Louis was that they wouldn’t. That life would stop adding and only take away. Louis thought that each choice narrowed your road until you were stuck, and that if each choice in your life was made by you and you alone, then you’d end up being the only one stuck on the road. That was his worst nightmare. Louis needed people to live.

And Liam needed them, too. It had taken him ages to figure out what that one unbreakable, all encompassing commonality was between them that made them so close when most common sense would think they’d never get along. It had bugged him for so long, like a tune you can’t find a name for. It was not easy to find. So, when he looked at Louis crying on Zayn’s bedroom floor, and when Louis looked back at him, Liam wasn’t surprised this was the first time Louis had seen it.

Liam didn’t ever want to be alone. Louis didn’t ever want to be alone, either. And so, simply, because of that, they never would be. Even when they had to do something on their own.

Liam watched Niall and Louis shuffle through the door, heard Niall call “wrong way” and heard Louis tell him he was running to the bathroom and to head on without him.

The door swung shut behind him, and he did what he’d wanted to do when he first got in the room – snuggled up next to Zayn, wrapping him in Liam’s own body warmth to improve his. He felt Zayn sink back into him just a bit, pulling with him the plate of food onto the bed and starting to pick at the ham. Liam smiled.

“I know he’s not my best friend, by the way,” said Liam. “He’s yours.”

He felt Zayn’s chest rise and fall under his arm, heard his head shake against the pillow.

“No, he’s yours, man,” he said.

Liam didn’t know what to say.

“Yeah?” he tried. “And what are we?”

To his surprise, he too had gotten a smile to tug at Zayn’s lips.

“A confusing, scary drag.”

 

Louis trudged through the snow covering the back yard of the grounds and tried not to think about what Zayn would say about his choice of shoes. Truthfully he did have boots, but they used to belong to his mom’s new boyfriend and he hated them. Now the snow was soaking the canvas of his trainers, and each fresh wave of freezing cold that brought upon him was making him question why the hell he had decided to do this in the first place.

At the back of the yard was a path, hardly cleared over the past few days of snow fall and not very noticeable to even a close passer by - not unless they knew what they were looking for. Louis followed it past the tree line and into the woods, glancing behind himself just as he ducked inside to make sure he wasn’t being followed. They probably wouldn’t even ask him to stop if they spotted him. They’d just creep along behind him and take notes for his file. He entertained himself wondering exactly how long they would follow without saying something. To the edge of the property? To the town line? The county? Could he get to Heathrow with a stolen wallet and fake ID before he got a quiet throat clearing and a polite, “Sir, please be advised lights out is at nine PM sharp.”

The outside of Avalon was quiet enough within feet of the building. All the way out here, Louis felt completely alone. The sensation crept up his skin with the winter chill, and he pulled the collar of his thin coat up tighter around his face. At this time, late afternoon creeping towards dusk, the woods were full of sounds – tiny and insignificant to most people, probably, but to Louis they were like fireworks. Snapped branches, rustled brush. Everything was making him jump, startled, and shoot a glare in the direction of the source of the noise, like you would to someone who was rudely disturbing a movie.

The headmaster’s house was about half a mile from the tree line in a massive clearing all its own perfectly hidden in the middle of the woods. Louis came onto the property through the back and made a thousand jokes about that in his head to calm his nerves. Out the front was a long drive that lead to the main road that the institution was also on, and in it sat an expensive town car. This meant everyone was still home, which was both a blessing and a curse.

Louis had only been here once before.

It was only a few months after he had met Harry and only a few weeks after Harry told him that they were dating and that he wasn’t seeing any other boys at his normal person school. That’s how they started dating, after all. When Harry had told him so. Liam had gotten Louis all worked up about how grand of a gesture it had been for Harry to declare that and had had him convinced that he should do something in return. Somehow, unbelievably, despite the rules of the school and the laws of the whole country itself, this grand return gesture ended up involving him sneaking to Harry’s house and throwing stones at his window (because of some movie Liam had seen when he was child). But when Louis got, well, just about where he was right now, he had chickened out, thought he’d been seen by a gardener, panicked (literally), and sat trying to regain his normal breath by a tree a few yards into the woods.

Zayn and Liam had found him, because of course they had followed him in in the first place to see how their plan worked out. Zayn ended up chucking a rock at the window for fun, unsure and uncaring of whether it was Harry’s window or not. A figure, mysteriously Harry-like, had moved its way to the window, but the boys were so scared they took off the way they’d came. Louis never asked him if it had been him, if he had seen them there or not.

Now he stood, facing this same window, different season, darker, older, even more so than could be explained away by the months in between, and he was wondering if Zayn had been right. Was this the right window? Was this the right choice? Was this an adventure he deserved?

He clutched a stone from the garden, which was dead with disuse, jostled it around in his hand for a few moments thought, weighing, worrying, overthinking, ruining. Until he drew is arm back and threw.

It was an agonizing few seconds, and it could have only been that, until Harry’s face appeared in the window, confused, startled, then beaming. He held up a finger as if to say – “one second” – then he disappeared into the house. It was another atrociously long few moments until the back door snuck open and a single arm dramatically emerged and held itself out for him. A smile pushed so insistently onto his face that his cheeks ached with the attempted repression of it. He kept his eyes darting between every window – and there were quite a lot in an epic sort of rich boy home like this – to make sure no one else was looking. He crossed the yard quickly, reached one arm as well, until the two of them grabbed onto each other in the doorway. Louis kissed him against the wall just like the first time back at school.

“Happy Christmas,” Harry said, an uncontrollable smile still spread on his face, no attempt at repressing it. “What are you doing here?”

Louis shrugged. “I just wanted to see you.”

Harry beamed still, making the kind of unwavering eye contact that made Louis itch with anxiety and soar from adoration all at the same time. He came to, remembering himself, and pulled Louis through the door.

“Look at you, you’re freezing,” Harry said. “Don’t you have a better coat?”

Louis could tell by the tiniest of winces that flew across Harry’s normally pleasant face that he’d just caught himself in a privileged slip, so Louis decided to let him off the hook.

“Well, I could have worn boots,” Louis said in lieu of admonishment. Harry smiled back at him, acknowledging the favor.

Harry’s house was exactly the kind of place one would imagine produced a Harry. It was dark and cozy and somehow gave off the air of being candle lit even thought Louis could see no candles. It was eclectically decorated around a theme that seemed to be something along the lines of “thirteen year old Egyptian king” or “accidental dream world traveler” and that all made perfect sense as well. It was easy to get lost in it, and so Louis was several halls and doorways into the bowels of his home before he realized he’d been blindly following.

“Where’s your dad?” he said. “Where are we going?”

“In his study,” said Harry. “And my room.”

They passed the living room and Louis caught sight of a massive, impeccably decorated Christmas tree with two, modest, neat piles of opened gifts underneath it.

“I – “ said Louis, “ – he’s not gonna care?”

“Well, he’s not gonna notice,” said Harry, leading them up a grand staircase now. “Did you and the boys have Christmas dinner? Are you hungry?”

“Oh, we made our own on the radiators,” said Louis, distracted still by the staged photos of Harry at steadily decreasing ages as they ascended the stairs.

“We do overheat that place.”

“What did you guys have?”

“Sorry?” said Harry, in his booming and obvious voice.

Louis instinctually shushed him and refused to answer until Harry had led them down another small handful of corridors and one more stair case up to his room. It matched the rest of the house, sort of, except it looked like the place where any trinkets, instruments, items of furniture or decorations the other rooms didn’t want took refuge and found someplace they’d be accepted. Harry’s bed was canopied in heavy dark red drapes and his record player looked like it was worth roughly seven times the cost of Niall’s. His closet door was open and neatly lined with pressed and hung shirts, some of which Louis had never seen. The thought of that filled him with the ridiculous compulsion to force Harry to try them all on to make up for the lost opportunity and time.

“Sorry, what did you ask before?” Harry said.

So much lost time, though.

Louis had come here with a purpose. He had a folded pile of papers burning a hole in the pocket of his inefficient poor kid’s coat. It was the kind of grand gesture he’d intended upon all those months before. And here he was, and he was still okay with all that, except he was crippled suddenly with the thought of all of that damn time, and he couldn’t bring himself to even answer Harry’s simple question, let alone stand out on the ledge he’d come here to stand on. Just years and years – ten years old, twelve, fourteen, younger. A whole alternate reality rolled out in his imagination in which he’d known Harry all that time and everything shifted in that granted premise. His whole life, warmer, fuller, making so much more sense.

What a terrifying concept, that people could change you that much without your expressed permission. What a wild idea that you could walk into a library one day and whole worlds would move to accommodate it. Liam’s point earlier was that Louis didn’t have to choose between going alone to take a chance on Harry and the comfort and familiarity of their friendship forged there in that school without him. But relationships were, by their very nature, undertaken by two individual people, alone. No one else could ever really know what it was like for Louis in stolen closets and long walks down snowy paths in the woods, just as Harry could never really know about cooking mashed potatoes on radiators and trying to come to terms with being broken. If all these people could change you – or at least mold your world into something that made space, allowed for them – then no option was truly predictable, no futures ones you could bet on. If everyone walked their own paths, and those paths intersected into irreparable mutations, then all that was left to plan on was a lattice work of randomness and individualized chaos.

Chaos. That was something Louis could probably feel good counting on. After all, chaos was all he’d felt inside him since the day he and Harry had met. Chaos was what had sent him to Avalon in the first place. Louis had thought that meant something was wrong with him. But now, in a way, it all started to make some kind of sense. If he could find comfort in chaos, the future couldn’t surprise him. And, of anyone, Louis was someone who thrived in chaotic situations. He caused them. He ruled over them like a king.

“I got you a Christmas present,” said Louis.

Harry lit up and ran for his bedside table. “Oh, me too!”

Louis dropped onto his bed and kicked off his soaking wet canvas shoes. “Okay, you first.”

After some shuffling, Harry settled in next to him, crashing onto the bed in his unselfconscious manner and jostling Louis where he sat.

“Okay,” said Harry, “I’m a little afraid you’re going to be mad at me.” Louis raised an eyebrow. “But I just want you to know that I got this for you because it genuinely reminded me of you. Honestly. That’s the only reason. I’m not trying to –“ But Harry couldn’t seem to articulate what it was he thought Louis would assume he was trying to do. “Anyway. Here. I love you. Happy Christmas.”

The gift was unwrapped but concealed in a blue velvet box that just fit in Louis’s two hands. Harry watched him intently, like any minute he was going to fly out of the room. Louis tried not to dwell on how guilty this made him feel. He knew this couldn’t be entirely his fault, logically, even if he didn’t feel that way in his gut. He opened the box before Harry could get any more nervous.

It was a watch. An absolutely unreal one that looked both ancient and futuristic all at once. It had more markings than Louis knew what to do with and the richest colors – golds and maroons – surrounded by a sleek stainless steel band and casing. It did look like him; it was unbelievable. Old and young. Beat up and put back together again. He gulped trying to find words for it, and he felt terrible each moment that nothing came.

“It’s a diver’s watch,” said Harry, “which means it’s water proof. Or water resistant. I never remember the difference between the two. But I figured that’d be good since you’re always outside and we’re, you know…in England.”

Louis slid it onto his wrist and tightened the clasp. He held his arm out so he could get a better look at it; it must have been hundreds of dollars if not over a thousand and yet it still made total sense next to his beat up old sweats. And though the thought of that amount of money made him sick, Harry was wrong. He couldn’t be mad about Harry having spent it. It wasn’t just Louis that it matched. It was the two of them together. He was obsessed with it.

“Thank you so much,” he said, his voice quiet and scratched like an old record. He leaned over until his left shoulder hit Harry’s right one, and Harry, the one with the greater distance to cross, lowered his head onto Louis’s shoulder. “You are literally the nicest person.”

“Thank you,” Harry said softly as well. He ran a finger down Louis’s sleeve. “Do you want to take your coat off?”

“No, I’m still cold,” Louis chuckled.

Harry wrapped his arms around Louis’s waist pinning his arms to his body in the process. Louis chuckled again.

“I can’t get your present now, though.”

“Okay.”

“C’mon, it’s in my pocket.”

“Later.”

Louis nudged him playfully with his hip. “C’mon. I’m gonna lose my nerve.”

Harry sat up, eyes wide at the prospect of a present that would make Louis nervous to give. For his part, Louis was just trying not to panic. He could already feel his mind starting to pull away from him; that was the only way he could think to describe it. He retreated in on himself, his thoughts got so jumbled and rapid and all at once that it started to make him feel physically nauseous. And he had to escape, get out, move, move, run until he was too exhausted to think anything at all. Sometime he really did throw up. Sometime he crashed so hard from a bout of anxiety that he really did feel like he was too tired to move, and it was one of the only instances in which he understood what it might be like to be Zayn.

As for right now, he was fixating on Harry’s chest rising and falling in his ridiculous Christmas sweater and trying to make his own breath match it. Harry noticed and held out his hand, wrist up, so Louis could feel his pulse. Louis didn’t take it. He looked up at a random fold in the canopy and stared it, repeating the phrase “everything’s fine, you’re fine” over and over until it was one of the only things left in his head, trite and sing-song like a lyrics from a pop song.

The whole thing only took a little past a minute. He exhaled slowly one last time.

“Cool.”

Harry sat up straighter as Louis dug into his pocket and pulled out the folded papers he’d carried here. He started to unfold them, facing them to himself, but on Harry’s lap.

“This is your present,” said Louis. “Sorry that I didn’t wrap it.”

Harry turned his head to read the papers instead of turning them away from Louis, because of course he did. Louis tried to remember how he’d stacked them. The top one had the header Your Personal Panic Attack Response List and had after it, “If you’re with another person, try to notice how they are breathing.”

Harry pushed that one aside and saw a prescription for a low dose of benzodiazepine that Louis himself had scrawled with the phrase, “only for emergencies” with ten exclamation points and a smiley face. After that was a letter of intent and finally a document singed by Dr. Heiman and Louis himself titled My Graduation Track.

It was probably selfish, or at least self-congratulatory, to anticipate a huge smile on Harry’s face, but Louis was still a little disappointed when he didn’t get it. It took him several painful seconds to realize it was because Harry was getting all emotional. He fell pray to his usual instinct and tried to knock the whole thing down a peg or two.

“Now, don’t get all excited, okay?” Louis said. “I’m not going on meds, not all the time. I’m not gonna be some weird fucking zombie, right? This stuff is just for emergencies, so I’m still gonna be, you know, like this most of the time.” Harry laughed and shook his head, probably because Louis had made the ridiculous assumption Harry hadn’t noticed the “for emergencies” language scrawled all over the prescription.

“It’s gonna be fucked up, Harry,” Louis continued. “Like potentially very fucked up. Like potentially total breakdowns in your living room when you’re trying to study for uni. You understand that right?” Harry didn’t answer. Louis couldn’t accept that. “Tell me you understand that or I’m taking it all back. If I’m gonna be a mess I’m gonna do it here where we get fresh baked biscuits every other night and Liam will tolerate me.”

“I understand that,” Harry said, his voice low, almost inaudible.

He was finally starting to smile, but some unexpected smile, kind of like the one he had invented just for Louis but a softer version of it. The one he’d invented for Louis but without the part of it that was foolish.

Louis took a breath so deep he felt like a whole other part of his lungs was thrown open, and when he exhaled several tears escaped his eyes simultaneous to it. He didn’t realize how on edge he’d been. He was shocked he’d made it through that without having a panic attack. The thought of it made him very uncomfortable. He wondered if this was being proud of himself.

“I want to get out of here, Louis,” Harry said. “I know it’s not – “ And Louis knew that face, too. It was the face he made when he almost said something he thought would sound stupid to Louis or offend him, his guarded rich boy face. Louis hoped that wasn’t something he put upon him. “I know everyone acts all progressive and open-minded at Avalon. And everything’s pretty cool.”

Leave it to Harry to describe an entire educational and medical institution as “pretty cool.” Harry didn’t speak for several more moments as he pushed his hand through his hair, a compulsion you’d think someone who had such long hair for so long would have lost by now, and watched some unidentified spot in the middle distance. He waited so long, Louis reviewed his last line to make sure it hadn’t in fact been a complete thought. When he spoke again, his voice was still quiet and small, something that sounded unnatural on him, and Louis was filled with the thought that someone somewhere deserved to be punished for this.

“Everyone thinks I’m so strange,” Harry said.

That wasn’t what Louis had been expecting. What did he mean? Who was everyone? How many people did Louis have to kick the shit out of exactly to make this right? He would need actual, solid numbers. He thought for one terrible second that Harry meant Liam, Zayn, Niall and the others, and he reeled back through every interaction he’d allowed them to have with Harry. Sure, they kind of thought Harry was weird. After all, with the exception of Zayn, most of them were pretty dirt poor and they weren’t used to the kinds of manners Harry was raised with. He was also fucking smart, not just smart - educated. Again, this was an exception with Louis and his friends. Even Zayn had spent some vital school years hidden in his bedroom or at therapy.

But all these things were what made Harry worth while. Or rather, these things alongside the fact that, in the end, Harry didn’t value any of those things. He just wanted to be some strange, tropical creature that thought too much about things in a way that didn’t give him anxiety the way it did Louis but rather brought him peace; that listened to people all the way through to the point where they genuinely didn’t want to talk about themselves anymore; to learn so much that he felt very, very small in a way that didn’t make him scared the way it did Louis but made him feel somehow more important.

Louis watched him smooth out his trousers meticulously like he were just waiting for Louis to start the next topic, like “everyone thinks I’m so weird” were just a relatively insignificant fact he felt, for no reason, compelled to share. But Louis could see him waiting for a response anyway. He could tell by the way he leaned toward him slightly, imperceptibly, a magnetic pull towards comfort he might not even know he craved. This was something Louis did, too, only he wasn’t slight or imperceptible at all. He waited, unwilling to break, until the very last minute, then he shoved Harry into the nearest empty classroom and launched himself into Harry’s arms. Louis wondered how many times he missed this subtle magnetic pull, how many times he’d launched himself over it.

“Anyway,” Harry finally said, “the point is just I want to get out of here. With you. Somewhere where we’ll…make more sense, I guess.”

“I don’t know where that is,” Louis said, horror stories from Niall’s swiped newspapers suddenly fresh in his mind.

“Me either,” Harry said, starting to tear up in earnest now.

“But we’ll find someplace,” Louis said, itching with the need to stop his tears. “And if we can’t, we’ll make it. You, me, and the other boys.”

“Are they getting out, too?”

The whole thing fell out before Louis could even consider the consequences. That was the thing with Louis – all hard edges and sarcasm with strangers, but for his friends, nothing but a big, open, nerve-ending-filled wound. He told Harry about how Ashton had ended up in the psych ward in the first place, how he and his friends had ignited their determination to finally get out, and about all the people who were coming to see them on the next visitation day to start making plans. Harry listened, his eyebrows slowly getting more and more drawn, until Louis realized the position he was putting him in and slowed to a stop. Harry seemed to struggle once again between good boyfriend to a crazy kid and responsible human with half an ounce of good sense. Or at least that’s how Louis chose to interpret it. He didn’t really trust any of his own opinions, as a general rule.

“Lou,” Harry said, “if some of those guys aren’t ready – “

“I know,” Louis said, eager to show they’d thought through it all. “But think of me, right? Wouldn’t you rather deal with my shit in an apartment we share, you know, in LA or San Francisco or New York or somewhere else rather than here in stolen closets hours and hours too late? Wouldn’t – don’t you want to spend actual Christmas together? And birthdays and summers and fucking Wednesday nights when we have nothing to do? I think – for once in my, like, tiny stupid limited life – that it’s better to just…fuck everything up! Just run at shit and do it wrong and get worse before you get better and try stuff and fail. Just do that, with my friends, with you. Maybe – maybe – m – “ He was getting so worked up he was starting to sound like Liam, which he always did when he couldn’t stop thoughts from pouring into his already overcrowded brain.

He tried to slow them again, like he did before, focusing on one repeated thought and an unremarkable place in the canopy. But it wasn’t working the way it had before. And he knew panicking was a poor way to illustrate his point. And he really believed in what he was saying, so he really resented being made to look foolish by ending it all in some kind of hyperventilating episode. But he couldn’t stop it. Not yet. Not with any great consistency. So, he did the next best thing he knew to do, which was just lower his head between his knees and give into it, let it wash over his back like a raging river, let it blow violently past him like a fast moving thunderstorm.

It took him a minute and several deep inhalations to acknowledge Harry’s hands planted firmly on either side of his waist, to feel his chin rested on his left shoulder blade, rising and falling with Louis’s increasingly steady breathing. When he finally calmed to the point of being able to speak – something that actually did, this time, take less than it normally would – he wasn’t quite sure what to say. So, he said exactly what he was thinking. Because it was Harry. And he could.

“I mean it, Harry.” He wanted so badly for him to understand that, to know.

Harry gripped Louis’s waist a little tighter, slid his chin down his shoulder blade until he was nuzzled right next to Louis’s face.

“I believe you,” Harry whispered. Louis turned so they were face to face. “And I will follow you wherever the hell you want to go. Are you okay?”

“I’m good. Are you okay?”

Harry smiled. “I’m better now.”


	14. December 31st, 1966 – 8:22PM

Zayn and Louis were running circles around the great hall pegging each other with bean bags snatched from a tossing game intended for much younger people and screaming about the world coming to an end.

Assistants and other staff sat around with the boys in this massive common space still decorated from the holidays, chatting, and sipping on non-alcoholic sparkling cider like this were a family party and not carefully monitored free time for a bunch of disturbed kids. It made Luke uncomfortable sometimes how much they tried to blur the lines between an actual home and a mental one. He thought Ashton and Michael might feel the same way, but Ashton was always trying to protect him, so he hadn’t allowed anyone to talk about it much past their exchange on the first day.

Calum was less bothered by it than anyone else was. Calum was not bothered by much, which Luke thought must be a great feat given the unfair circumstances that brought him here. When Luke looked at Calum – as he did now, he and Michael locked in a nail-biting game of high stakes (extra biscuit) poker – he thought about all the reasons he himself might be in here if only he ever talked about them.

For one, Calum’s reason. For another, probably something along the lines of Louis’s as Luke often times found the world to be too small and too tightly packed in to the point where he couldn’t quite catch his breath and he had to very quickly be completely alone.

If Luke could talk, if he had the strength to, there might be no end to the problems people would uncover and eventually, hopefully, be able to treat. But the irony was the sheer number of things that made Luke different were exactly the things that kept him from expressing them. And without any information, no one ever got past those two very simple, untreatable things that had come to define Luke:

  1. When he eight years old his older brother had died in front of him by drowning in a mostly frozen-over river.
  2. He hadn’t said a word since.



So, he wondered – was Calum’s pleasant acceptance of his own circumstances just his disposition? Or was it was as effective a mask as Luke’s silence was? He wished he could ask him.

Michael noticed Luke watching them, so Luke went back to watching Louis and Zayn run around the room. They had added an element of tagging Liam on the head every time they passed him as part of the routine. Liam giggled every time they did it.

He was very similar to Calum when it came to being good-natured, but it was different. Liam had a very defined problem and two under-funded, overwhelmed parents who had gotten an opportunity to help their son that they couldn’t say no to. Luke watched people’s families when they came to visit, mostly as a means of seeming occupied to his own, and Liam’s dad and sisters were always diligently discussing his education while his mother silently wept. They were good people in a bad situation. He couldn’t say the same for Calum’s.

The first Christmas they were all together back at the old home Michael and Calum’s family had gotten in a first rate fight.

Luke hadn’t been there when it started, but he’d figured out later that it had started because early in their visit Calum’s dad had called Calum a name. Not a good one. And Michael had overheard. By the time Ashton and Luke had arrived, Michael was already being dragged off screaming, Calum’s dad screaming back, calling him all kinds of other names that continued to reflect poorly on his own character. Ashton had tried in vain over the next several days to figure out where they’d brought Michael and what they’d done to him, but they never found out. All they knew was he’d come back three days later and wouldn’t talk about it. Calum gave him the pudding off his dinner every day for the next month and a half until Michael said it was starting to make him sick.

Now, Luke had the advantage of sitting just slightly behind Calum, with just enough of a sight of his hand that he could see him repeatedly cave to Michael’s inferior one. Calum caught him looking and gave him a sly smile that Luke tried to return without feeling self conscious. Ashton plopped down next to them shortly after, and he was grateful. Ashton was the only person with which Luke felt truly comfortable.

“Cal,” he said, his voice breathless and urgent but smiling. “I need you for my team. Niall, Liam and I want to play charades.”

“What about me?” Michael said.

“You’re shit at acting stuff out,” said Ash, still smiling. “And you don’t know as many movies and stuff as Calum. I’m always flawlessly reenacting shit you’ve never heard of. It’s just bad for the team.”

Michael and Luke sat in silence for a few minutes while Michael meticulously gathered the cards back into their packaging. Luke wouldn’t have been surprised if he just got up and walked away. Michael had a tendency to not acknowledge him without Calum or Ashton present. He claimed he couldn’t interpret Luke’s facial expressions and gestures the way the others could. Luke didn’t quite believe him.

In fact, he didn’t believe him at all. And while he was taking inventory of his own flaws, he thought it was worth pointing out that Michael was carrying around a long list as well. And yet, while Luke just tried to be as supportive and kind a friend as possible, Michael seemed to be obsessed with biting any hand that fed him. Sometimes it really got to Luke, though no one could tell because anger was an emotion he was outright professional at concealing. Michael sat there now and watched Calum act out a book title for Ashton. Calum held up two fingers, then two fingers again, then both his fists.

“The Warriors!” Ashton yelled immediately.

“Oh, what the hell??” Niall exclaimed.

Michael rolled his eyes.

Luke hit him lightly on the arm.

“What?” Michael said, spinning around.

Luke pointed at his ear then nodded his head to the stairs.

“In Ash’s room?” Michael said. See? He understood him just fine.

Luke nodded. Michael shrugged.

“Fine, I guess. Let’s go.”

Most of the orderlies were in the great room watching most of the boys, so Luke and Michael were able to sneak to Ashton’s room without issue. Michael walked ahead of Luke most of the way, and Luke watched him to get a better sense of why he’d agreed to do this. Luke had asked mostly just to annoy him. Now they were alone together for the first time in quite possibly their entire friendship. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

“What do you want to listen to?” asked Michael, flopping down on Ashton’s bed, opting not to choose out of laziness more than chivalry.

Luke bent over Michael’s and Niall’s joint collection to find something. He could feel Michael watching him over his shoulder, judging every record he paused at – not that one, not that one, ugh definitely not that, Luke, you have no taste at all. Michael would shoot down his own entire collection just to avoid admitting he and Luke liked any of the same music.

So, to continue annoying him, Luke picked something that he knew was Niall’s – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. It reminded Luke of some of the stuff his next door neighbor back home listened to that Luke’s mom always shook her head at. After he put it on, he leaned back and laid flat on the ground, staring up at the stucco ceiling, letting the music help him find patterns in it.

“This is lame,” Michael offered.

Luke took advantage of the no talking thing and ignored him.

“This guy sounds like a girl,” Michael tried again.

Luke bobbed his head to the beat of The Tracks of My Tears.

“I want to listen to The Doors.”

Luke propped himself up on his elbows, found Michael’s eye, and traced a single tear down his cheek as the titular line of the song played. Michael looked both appalled and amused.

“Fine,” he said petulantly, and collapsed back onto Ashton’s bed.

The rest of the song played through without incident. Down the hall, some boy whose voice Luke didn’t recognize started to shout; the placating voice of an orderly followed. The two of them faded from ear shot. The overall affect was eerie and more of what kept Luke from ever really settling in to this place. He didn’t realize he’d been eyeing the door until he caught Michael doing the same thing. They exchanged a look. Michael laid back down.

Long after the shouts had faded, though, Luke could still hear them. His mind brought him to several unwelcome places like back to their old home that had burned down and to Ashton’s story of the boys he’d helped get out of the orphanage. He tried to close his eyes and focus on the Miracles, but he kept going back and back and back to bad therapy sessions, kids who tripped him at school, the feel of his brother’s two strong hands shoving him off the ice and into the snow before he disappeared under it forever.

“Do you think there’s something Ashton’s not telling us?”

It took Luke a few seconds to recognize Michael’s voice as not being his brother’s, he was so lost in the memory. When he did, he sat up and saw Michael had not done the same. It was probably easier for Michael to say things like that to the ceiling. Of course if he wouldn’t look at Luke there was nothing he could say. So he just let Michael talk.

“I mean I know we can count on him. I’m not saying that we can’t,” Michael said like that was exactly what he was saying. “I just mean do you think he knows something about this place or senses it, you know, just because he’s been in and out of places like this forever. Do you think he knows or senses something like that and he’s not telling us?”

Michael seemed to realize he was caught in a one sided conversation, because after another few moments he sat up and moved toward the end of the bed.

Now Luke had to think about it. Ashton definitely chose what to talk to him about and what to not, and Luke suspected he did the same with the others, too, at least to some degree. He figured Ashton saw a lot of shitty things in the orphanage he was even less willing to talk about than the kids he set free. And Luke figured, if he was so reluctant to even admit to sneaking those kids out, so guilty over the circumstances he forced them to face when they were free, to agree to do it again was big. Motivated by something. And motivation from a guy in a situation like Ashton’s – even Luke’s or Michael’s – rarely came from a positive place like hope. Luke doubted Ashton thought this time would be different.

In the end he nodded his head and shrugged in a way he hoped said “maybe” and “probably” at the same time. Michael seemed to understand that but he huffed anyway and slid closer to the end of the bed, closer to Luke.

“He’d tell us though, right? If he thought it would make a difference for our whole, you know, plan to get the fuck out of here?”

Luke didn’t know about that either. Ashton put their well being over everything, even his own, so much so that, frankly, Luke sometimes found it a little annoying. Luke really believed in that. So, he didn’t think Ashton would keep something from them that would lead to them getting hurt. Again, if anything, he might be motivated to take a bigger risk by something going on here that he didn’t want to tell the boys about. But why not? Wouldn’t that just motivate them to put everything they’ve got into making it happen?

“Luke, I swear to shit,” Michael was saying. “Don’t give me that vague I don’t know face again. Fucking…here!” He snatched the sketch pad from Ashton’s end table and one of the colored pencils. “Write it down.”

The number of times he got asked that. It wasn’t about the talking. It was about the fully formed thoughts. He shook his head emphatically hoping to put an end to it.

“Luke! Take it.” Michael insisted.

Luke shook his head even more.

“Okay. No. Cool. Great.” Michael dropped the pad and pencil on the floor so they both hit Luke in the knee. “No, cool. We’ll just go through God fucking knows what because you don’t want to use a fucking pen. I’m definitely comfortable risking my life for that.”

Luke snatched up the pencil and threw it back at him. Michael ducked to avoid it then launched off the bed to retaliate. Luke tried to slide behind Niall’s bed but Michael grabbed him at the last minute, arms wrapped around his shoulders and pulled him back to the middle of the room. Did Luke mention close quarters were not good? Well, they weren’t. And tight grips were even worse.

He tried to just push Michael off of him, but Michael was surprisingly strong. He was in the middle of yelling at Luke again to just write something down, but Luke couldn’t breathe, and that was something he just really had to do. He definitely never meant to get violent. But he had to get away.

He bit Michael’s arm. So hard it drew blood. Then when his grip was loosened in surprise, he shoved an elbow into Michael’s side that dislodged him completely. Michael called out in pain, and Luke dove for Ashton’s bed. Michael turned, and they were locked in the opposite position they were when this whole thing started, one on the floor, one on the bed. Michael looked wounded and embarrassed, but also shocked and the faintest amount of impressed. Luke wished he could take credit for that, but the truth was he was hardly responsible for what he did when he was trapped.

For a moment it looked like Michael was thinking of ways to retaliate back. But then something in his face changed, and all he did was pick up the pencil.

“Look,” he said. “Calum’s not gonna talk to me about this kind of shit. You want me to like you? You want my, like, best friend blessing on whatever weird shit you two wanna do together? Then here’s what we’re gonna do.” He placed the pencil and pad of paper on the end of the bed, equidistant from each of them. “I’m gonna get over my anger shit and not kick the shit out of you for whatever the fuck all of that was,” he said, gesturing to the location of their fight. “And you’re gonna get over your shit just a little. And write me a fucking note. Now.” He slid the pad and pencil closer to Luke. “Is that cool with you?”

Of all the time they’d spent together, Luke was never quite sure what had sent Michael here. Ashton would never speculate with the others, because he thought it was Michael’s place to tell. Calum had shared his theories with Luke, however, and they mostly revolved around Michael having done something stupid when he got low.

Luke didn’t think that now. If Calum was a master at concealing anything that made him unpleasant, Michael was the exact opposite, an open nerve. The whole time they’d been digging for a deeper explanation, when in reality, Michael had been wearing his condition out on his sleeve the entire time. Michael was an angry person. It was something he just couldn’t control. Luke thought that lack of control probably shamed him. He knew how he felt when he lashed out the way he did just now.

The thing was, Michael had to know there was that mystery around him. They’d all had frank discussions about Calum and even Luke, to the degree to which Luke could initiate those. Even the boys in Niall’s group had opened up over late nights reheating stolen food on the radiator and listening to tunes. Michael had to know everyone was waiting for his story, and he had to intentionally not be giving it, even as he was giving it every single day. To call attention to it just now was huge for him, and to do it to Luke of all people was something even more.

So Luke mustered everything he could, and he picked up the pencil.

_How come you don’t talk about any of this with Ashton?_

It was easier than he’d thought. It was easier when it was about other people, probably, was the thing.

Michael read it.

“What, about what he’s keeping from us?”

Luke shook his head, then he pointed at Michael.

“Oh. That.” Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. Who cares? Isn’t it obvious enough anyway? I don’t talk about it in therapy either. I’ve been sitting in silence with the doctor in every fucking session since we got here.” He said it proudly.

Luke shook his head. He tried to think of a way to say what he wanted to without writing it, but now that he held the pencil and saw his own writing, doing it a second time didn’t seem as bad.

_Then how are you gonna get out?_

“Hey,” Michael responded, “I’m not here for your therapy. Ashton will sneak me out the same way he’s gonna have to sneak out that crazy ass Zayn kid. Lord fucking knows he’s not getting out on his damn merits. I don’t want to talk about this. Tell me what you think’s going on with Ashton.”

But it was too much. Too complicated. Too soon. He waved at Michael like he were beckoning him closer, trying to get him to ask a more pointed question. Michael looked confused at first, but he picked it up in no time.

“You think he’s hiding something?”

Luke shrugged and nodded again.

“About this place or about getting out.”

Luke wrote, _About here._

“Do you know what?”

Luke shook his head.

Michael was getting frustrated. “Well – what then??”

Luke thought over a response, his chest starting to tighten from the pressure. It was all turning back on him.

_I think he doesn’t like this place. Won’t tell why._

“Well, but what does that fucking matter if he’s planning on getting us all out?” Michael said.

Luke wrung his hands, the pencil digging into his palms. He started to feel incredibly restless, like if he had to sit on this bed one second longer he’d tear his own legs off just for the changed it’d bring; it was an unbearable sensation. Once again he was choked up with the volume of words, until he thought of just one that would probably do the trick.

_All?_

Michael read the word over and over again, each time bringing more and more meaning to it until realization dawned fully and he looked up at Luke.

“You think he’s gonna leave some of us behind?”

Luke shrugged. He really didn’t know. But Michael was right. If Ash was planning on them all leaving by June, then any details or even inklings that Avalon were anything less than an upstanding institution would only serve to motivate them all to work harder, plan more toward their goal.

But if someone had to be left behind, the last thing he’d want is to have them feel like they were staying someplace terrible. It was a shitty conclusion to have to draw about someone you called your best friend. But it was the only one Luke had.

Michael sunk back to the floor, looking horror-struck, alone. Luke rarely initiated physical intimacy for the reasons he’d neatly demonstrated moments ago, but he was still overcome with the desire to sit down there with him and give him a hug. He knew what he was thinking, because Luke was thinking it, too.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” he said, helpless. “He thinks I’m not healthy enough.”

Luke shrugged again, because again, he really didn’t know. But from Ashton’s imagined perspective, Michael was two very detrimental things: volatile and unreliable. Two things very ill-suited for carrying out a delicate, well-laid plan. He remembered the conversation he and Calum had had in the woods. He hoped Calum wasn’t in on it.

Michael remained in shock. Luke couldn’t take it anymore. He moved from the bed to the floor and just sat next to Michael, legs crossed, his left arm just touching Michael’s right to let him know he was here if he needed him. Michael didn’t even seem to notice him there until Luke gently nudged him. Then he faced him, the kindest look he’d ever given Luke spread across his face.

“Will you at least try to take me with you?”

Luke looked back, taking a few deep breaths, then reached for the pencil and pad.

_You’re coming with us._


	15. December 31st, 1966 – 11:41PM

Zayn’s room was pitch black so the moonlight could shine through. He was propped up across the window ledge and the radiator, one leg pulled to his chest, the other dangling over the edge. Liam was leaned next to him; both of them were fixated out the window. Louis was dead asleep on Zayn’s bed behind them. So he was missing the fireworks.

They were coming from somewhere over the horizon to the north, and they were twenty minutes too early. Zayn imagined some over eager, already drunk dad in the country showing off to his freezing cold neighbors, lighting fires and shouting Happy New Year to the moon. These were Zayn’s neighbors back where he was from – all well to do people with fancy New Years parties and illicit materials you’d be arrested for in poorer neighborhoods. This was not his father. His father was the one standing in the back of the crowd of on lookers, sober and raising an eyebrow at everyone who was enjoying the festivities, including his son who, at the time, could be found at the front of the crowd of on lookers egging on his friends to get too close to the fireworks and hanging off his hysterically drunk mom. Well, that was him depending on the day it was anyway. Last year had been a good day. Today was a good one, too.

The fireworks were impressive, which is why Zayn figured they were coming from a rich hood like his. They were bright yellows and blues, every new color washing Liam’s face in itself. Liam was quiet, smiling, eyes sparkling; Zayn could tell he was tired or else he’d be giddy and stuttering on about how “amazing” and “incredible” the display was. He watched him watch the fireworks a little longer; he was probably watching Liam longer than the fireworks themselves. But Liam didn’t notice. He was too transfixed. Zayn allowed himself to imagine what Liam’s New Years Eves were like before the home. Images of his quiet sisters and even quieter parents sitting ever quietly around a dining room table and watching the ball drop on the TV in the next room filled his mind. It was comfortable, but small. Too small for someone like Liam. Liam was huge inside. He had the biggest heart Zayn had ever known. He could swallow everyone’s love whole.

“I wonder what they’ll do at actual midnight,” Liam wondered. Zayn didn’t want to tell him this was probably all they had planned.

“I don’t know,” he said instead.

Liam turned towards him like, despite having just spoken to him, he had almost forgotten he was there.

“Well this was pretty impressive as it is,” Liam said.

The last of the fireworks died. Louis turned over and grumbled in his sleep, and Liam and Zayn turned to see just how much he was rising. There was a long moment’s silence, and then the comfortable white noise of his heavy breathing returned. Liam turned and slid up onto the window sill next to him. Only the left side of his face was shone on by the moon light.

“Ten minutes,” Liam said, nodding to the clock on the opposite wall.

Zayn nodded, but kept his eyes on Liam.

“You tired him out, I think. I haven’t seen him in a such a good mood in quite some time now. Trying to get released must be stressing him out.”

Zayn spared a glance for Louis. “Dunno. Haven’t gotten a chance to hang out with him much these past couple of weeks.”

Liam furrowed his brow. “Yeah, I noticed that. Everything cool?”

Zayn shrugged and turned back to Liam. Even in the dark he could see genuine concern in his eyes. “Think he’s just going someplace else, you know?”

His brow furrowed even more. He clearly didn’t get the same sense.

“I just mean,” Zayn tried to explain, “he’s working on his thing, and…he’s got Harry and all that. I’m not really on the same page.”

Liam shrugged. “Well, I’m not really on the same page either I guess. That’s just the thing with friends though, innit? You just gotta hang in there and see where they end up and be there for them.”

Zayn nodded in a noncommittal way. He wasn’t sure how much he agreed with that, but the last thing he wanted to do right now was argue. Liam didn’t even argue anyway; he had Louis for that. Liam just got upset and tried to understand you. It defeated the entire point.

The thing was you couldn’t get much past Liam. He was watching Zayn intently, like he were trying to read him like a book. He readjusted on the window sill and seemed to be considering what to say next. If Zayn knew Liam, and if he knew himself, Liam was trying to figure out how to broach an uncomfortable subject.

“What do you think you’re gonna do when you get out of here, Zayn?” Liam said, his voice just about as light as he could make it.

Zayn shrugged, and he hoped it came across as casual and not as the lie it really was. “Dunno,” he said again. “Probably go back home for a bit. Try to get into school.”

“You think you can do that?” Liam sounded hopeful.

He shrugged again. Zayn did not think he could do that. But Zayn also didn’t have any plans on going home either.

“You think you’ll still see all of us when you go back home?” Liam said.

And this was just about where Zayn figured he’d been heading. He glanced back to the clock, seeking a distraction.

“Five minutes,” he said.

But Liam only granted it a glance. “Zayn?” he insisted.

“I… don’t know, Liam. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. You, me, him. Like I said, we’re not in the same place anymore. Haven’t really been for a while. You two have your coping mechanisms and emergency drugs. I’ve got weeks and weeks at time where I just cannot feel. Just can’t feel, Liam. Can’t get out of bed, can’t speak. How does a person like me fit in in that world? Your world, the world you’re planning when your do-gooder friends break you free. No, I’m…” It was hard to keep going under the weight of Liam’s piercing gaze. “I’m headed someplace different.”

Liam was the same in any conflict, argument or not. The gears in his head worked even now to resolve Zayn’s words, to find a way that they made sense with what he himself knew, even though Zayn’s point was that they wouldn’t; the directions they were headed in were just too different to come to terms.

Finally, Liam looked to the floor, eyes still searching for an answer there but much less hopeful to find it.

“He’s gonna miss you.”

That was another lie Zayn told, that Louis wouldn’t. He tried to tell himself Louis was too distracted by his own new world to account for Zayn’s, when the reality was Louis made room in his world for anyone who wanted to enter it, however little time he could devote to you when you got there.

Zayn required more. It was a selfish thought, but an unavoidable one. He had a lot of personal requirements that had never been filled. He missed a lot of things he was not yet able to be. He explored on his own. So he couldn’t share a space when he was trying to become them. He’d never heal with Louis around.

“And you?”

Zayn wasn’t even planning on asking that. Somewhere deep in the school the clock started to sound twelve charms for midnight and the start of a brand new year. Despite the fact that lights out was three hours ago, cheers rung out from up and down the floor, and Zayn struggled to listen for Liam’s answer despite it. He couldn’t bring himself to raise his eyes and look for it.

Until Liam reached out and touched his fingers to Zayn’s chin. And Zayn lifted his head involuntarily. Liam leaned in, pressed his lips to Zayn’s, and sparklers shot through his veins, from his gut to the tips of his fingers and toes. He was on fire, felt it so fully it was like Liam had the power to transfer his own unyielding energy and will to Zayn with just his kiss. Just as Liam meant to move away, Zayn moved into it more, their hands sliding up each other’s forearms until they gripped each other at either elbow. Zayn thought of all the times Liam had come to his room while he was stuck inside there, touched his arms just like this, wrapped Zayn’s body in his own. And it never felt like this. Comfortable, maybe. Reassuring and calm. But this was something else entirely. Something that didn’t just keep the terrible stuff at bay but filled him with all the good stuff, too.

They kissed until the cheering from around the halls had died, the clock downstairs stopped chiming, and their own clock read 12:04. Their hands lingered, Liam’s fingers delicately tracing lines on the back Zayn’s upper arms, Zayn’s staying firmly gripped around Liam’s elbows. Zayn exhaled without realizing he’d been holding his breath.

“Happy New Year,” Liam said in a quiet version of his usually upbeat voice. “It’s 1967.”

A smile snuck onto Zayn’s lips.

“Yes it is.”

Liam’s expression reflected Zayn’s plussed up a thousand times. He bit his lip to try to contain it. Zayn hoped he was unsuccessful.

“I really hope he hasn’t woken up,” said Liam and they both devolved into giggles.

“Come on,” said Zayn, rising from the window sill but still hooked on Liam’s elbows. “Let’s go wander around while everything’s empty and dark.”

“But they’ll probably catch us,” Liam protested though he’d grabbed up his sweater and thrown it back on over his head.

“Then we’ll head back to yours.”

Liam bit his lip again. “Okay.”

“Cool. Let’s get in trouble.”

Zayn threw the door open and stepped cautiously into the hall. An assistant had just turned the corner down the adjacent hall, so Zayn turned them in the other direction. Before he stepped away, however, he turned to face Liam in the door way, so close face to face that he could feel Liam’s breath on his cheeks.

“You I’ll come back for, you know that, right?” Zayn said.

A bittersweet expression stole Liam’s usual smile. He was winning and losing at the same time. All he could do was nod.

Then they were off.


	16. January 12th, 1967 – 11:27AM

Ashton and the boys had exactly one class together. It was literature. Top floor of this monstrous castle they called a school and Ashton called an institution so the room was drafty and it creaked but the view was fucking incredible. Michael hadn’t talked to him for several days.

Which was really a disappointment, because he really thought they’d cleared that whole thing up. But he walked in today yet again, sat on the other side of Calum and wouldn’t even glance in his direction. Ashton tried to freeze out the hot tension in his gut by staring at the blinding white snow that still covered the grounds. Their professor was droning on about Romeo and Juliet in the least romantic way that that had ever been done.

“So, when Romeo’s friends show disapproval of his relationship with Juliet, where do you think that’s coming from? What is their motivation?”

They somehow managed to make even the book discussions sound like psych evals.

“Think about it,” the professor kindly suggested. “What are the conflicts that are coming out of this relationship? David?”

The kid in the back looked petrified to answer.

“Um. I guess. They don’t like her family?”

“That’s exactly right. There’s a conflict between their families. Romeo’s friends are aligned with his family’s house. Try to imagine it like two cities supporting two different football teams.”

Oh god, the pandering was, most days, completely unbearable. Ashton found himself in these classes longing for the days of the shitty old home where at least he and the boys were left the hell alone. Just as he tried to make the time pass by starting to count the remaining leaves on the nearest tree, he heard an unexpected voice jump into the conversation.

“Well, maybe they just think Juliet’s an asshole.”

The professor cleared his throat. “Language, Michael.” Calum chuckled. “But tell me what motivates your comment.”

Today’s theme was motivation if that had been in any way fucking subtle. Still, Ashton was eager to hear Michael’s response.

“I just mean maybe Romeo’s friends just flat out didn’t like her. Or maybe they thought she was a waste of his fucking time.”

“Language,” the professor said again. “A waste of his time, how?” To his credit he was awfully fucking persistent.

“Well, you know how it is,” Michael said. “When you can see your friend is acting like a fucking idiot, but he’s somehow the only one fucking oblivious to that fact so you have to be a little extreme to get his attention. Maybe threatening to kill her cousins was their answer to that.”

“Michael. Langua – “

“Yeah, language, I fucking know, but hear me out.” He was leaning forward in his seat now, and so, Ashton noticed was Luke. Ashton leaned forward in his seat as well. “See, I think the smartest guy in the whole damn play is Mercutio. That guy? He just wants to have a damn good time. He wants to hang out with his friends and just, you know, chill out and do their thing. He doesn’t want to start any drama with anyone, least of all these fucking ritzy ass Capulets who think they know more than he does.” More people leaned forward in their seat now. The professor didn’t stop him to call out his swearing. “But Romeo won’t just chill out, you know? He thinks he’s found some grand god damn solution to love, life, and every other damn thing in this rich girl who doesn’t know any better either. And he’s just gonna go ahead and blow all the good stuff up – all the friendships and their, you know, shitty family or house or whatever – all that stuff they got going on. Just for a little pussy!”

“Michael, language.” He couldn’t possibly let that one pass, but his voice lacked conviction.

“All I’m saying,” Michael continued, “is Mercutio knew what the hell was up. And he tried to stop Romeo from running off, you know? He tried to stop him from leaving everything he had behind to go someplace he, you know…he didn’t know where he was going. And if that motherfucker hadn’t god damn run off…all pretending his was dead and shit then his bird wouldn’t have gotten all sad and just…a lot of shit could have been avoided.”

Luke, who had inexplicably taken a seat on the other side of Michael, next to neither Calum nor Ashton, at the start of class, leaned over to Michael’s desk now and picked up his pen. The professor was starting to formulate his assessment of Michael’s speech just as Luke scrawled something into Michael’s notebook. Ashton and Calum sat bolt upright in their seats.

“Luke – “ Calum started.

But Michael interrupted. “Oh, wait. Luke wants to add that Romeo probably had good intentions,” he paused to check the rest as Luke finished, “but that he wasn’t taking the time to see things from Mercutio’s perspective. He misspelled Mercutio though – you misspelled – it’s an e at the beginning. He misspelled it, but I think his point is fair.”

“Luke,” Cal said, “what the fucking fuck?”

“Mr. Hood, language. Luke, I really appreciate your point. Let’s all talk about perspective…”

After class Michael and Luke were amongst the first out the door, but they waited politely for Calum and Ashton to catch them up, which Ashton had to say was pretty motherfucking symbolic. He was sure he looked furious when he reached them, because Luke looked just a little bit scared. He also looked a bit defiant though, which was the only expression Michael wore.

“Head to lunch then?” Michael said, as though the world hadn’t just exploded.

“Lukey, when did you start writing?” said Ashton, laying a hand on Luke’s shoulder that Luke looked willing to allow but unenthusiastic about in general.

If Michael had turned Luke on him somehow Ashton swore he would lose it. I mean, properly lose it. Give up. Fuck off. Never speak to another god damn human being ever again. He couldn’t bear the thought of it after everything they’d all been through. The few months away from Michael had been bad e-fucking-nough. He didn’t know what else he had to do to prove to Michael he was just trying to look out for the best for all of them. Ashton loved Calum, but if Michael took Luke that would simply be the last straw. He’d spent his whole damn life trying to find friends like this, and he’d been contemplating losing them ever since they made their ridiculous plan to leave this place. He was exhausted and now he’d been lied to – or at least kept from – and he was buzzing with the energy it was taking not to either yell or cry.

“When I fucking asked him to,” Michael said.

“Luke?”

Luke pulled Michael’s notebook from his arm and his pen from his hand, though Michael showed signs of slight resistance. He took a few moments to write something down and then he handed it directly to Ashton. Ashton found himself not wanting to read it.

It said: _Are you planning on leaving one of us behind?_

And it was almost a relief. At least he knew the answer to that one.

“No,” he said insistently. “Of course not. What the hell would make you even think that?”

“Guys,” Calum chimed in. “I don’t think we should be talking about this in the middle of the hall.”

So Luke wrote as they walked. Down the hall, past a line of boys waiting to use one of the restrooms. He handed the notebook back after giving Michael a chance to look at it. Ashton could tell Calum was surprised and, though he’d never admit it, a little hurt at their secret budding friendship.

_Then why are you hiding how you really feel about the school?_

This one was not a relief. He had no idea how they’d perceived it, but this one was one hundred percent true. Ashton turned over all the complicated feelings he had for this place in his head hoping to find an easy explanation. On the outside, Avalon was a progressive place that believed reform was preferential to punishment when it came to boys who were not so-called “normal” as it was defined by common society. When you lived here, you were educated, you had a regular platform in which you could talk and you were helped in return, you weren’t mistreated, malnourished, or mistrusted. For the most part, you were allowed to go about your normal business.

It was the following, Ashton suspected, that first started to get to him. Assistants, as they called them, were everywhere. In the halls, outside your bedroom, outside classrooms, on the grounds, wandering the lunchroom as they ate. It was the consistent way they said “language.” It was the indifference with which they’d handled their rooming when they’d first arrived. The curriculum, the schedules – everything here was so rigid, controlled. It was like a performance of understanding and help more than it was understanding and help itself.

And above all, it was this: in the six months they’d been there Ashton had yet to see anyone be released. Graduated as they called it. The story they told was all about recovery. But the way they ran this place, it was like they were training you to be in homes just like it the rest of your life.

“Eight is a lot of people,” he started. They’d hit the ground floor and Ashton tried to get them lost in the crowd queuing up for the cafeteria. “As far as I know Louis and Liam are the only ones who are even trying to test out of this place. As if that were even possible.”

He could feel the eyes of the other three on him when he said it. Cynicism was not a usual hat he wore. He didn’t know what to say to them, however, other than seventeen years is a long time to stay positive about something. He hoped they didn’t give up hope themselves.

“And there’s an unavoidable point in the escape process,” Ashton continued, “where all eight of us have to cross the massive, empty grounds in order to hit the woods and take the trail I found to the back road.”

He was hoping the blanks would fill in themselves, but they didn’t seem to. Luke hit Michael on the arm, trying to prompt him to ask. Michael kept looking at Calum who, for his part, seemed to be starting to get it.

“So…what?” Michael said, finally pushed by Luke’s insistence. “You’re saying we can’t do it?”

“I’m saying,” Ashton said, edging them away from the crowd just a bit, “we can’t do it without some kind of distraction. And we can’t get a distraction unless someone who’s still here is on our side, so – “

“You’re staying,” Calum concluded.

Michael and Luke stopped in their tracks. Ashton headed off their inevitable protests.

“It’ll be fine,” he insisted. “I’m an orphan, right? I’m not a direct threat to society and there’s no one for them to be accountable to. I just need to make it through until I’m 18 and they’ll usher me out of here same as they would have at the last home or at the orphanage itself. Just one more year, and I’ll come find you guys. I promise. You can send me letters here, we’ll work out some kind of code. Everything will go back to total normal in just a few – “

“No,” Michael said. “Not a fucking option, man. What, you’re just gonna leave Luke like that? Just let him figure his shit out on his own?”

Michael said Luke, but Ashton thought he meant someone else. Ashton grabbed him by the shoulders.

“I’m not leaving you. I’d never leave any of you. It’s just a little while longer and I promise I’ll find you wherever you – “

“Ashton,” Calum said, “you don’t know for sure they’ll let you out of here. They could make up some excuse, some illness. And even if you do, you don’t know what it’s gonna be like here in the mean time. Alone. Not even the other boys to hang out with. How can you do that?”

Ashton shrugged and gave them the same reason he had for most things in his life to this point.

“Because I have to.”

Michael was shaking his head. “We’re figuring out a way around this.”

“Michael, I thought about it a lot – “

“No, you think you’re the best at this, at figuring things out, but maybe you’re not. Maybe we just haven’t had a chance to be good at it because you’ve been doing everything for us.”

“Michael – “

Luke touched his shoulder and grabbed again for Michael’s notebook. He scrawled something quickly, then pushed it into Ashton’s chest. Ashton looked.

_Give us a chance._

And then he looked up at the three boys he’d known for years and noticed for the first time that they were three completely different people. Michael looked more tired, more serious than Ashton remembered him when he wasn’t around. Calum looked like an actual adult, a college student or a young lawyer or some other sort of profession you’d take very seriously if you met them outside a place like this. Even Luke was well on his way to a full grown beard; he’d somehow gotten even taller, which was both astonishing and offensive to a reasonably tall person like Ashton himself.

They weren’t the boys he’d first met at all. Or maybe they were just harder-edged versions of them. Ashton could have allowed this to concern him. Instead, he looked forward to seeing what these boys could do.

“Alright,” he said. “Nothing stupid, you got it?” They all nodded. “Okay then. Let me know what you come up with.”


	17. February 14th, 1967 – 2:12PM

Louis said this was the most ridiculously romantic thing he’d ever done.

Harry was tangled up in his arms on some stolen wool blanket that they’d dragged into one of the servant’s old rooms in the back of the kitchen. Harry had stolen something as well – two bottles of Krug Grande Cuvée from his dad’s collection in the cellar. Expensive, but not enough to be noticed as missing.

Of course by now both bottles were tossed someplace in the corner of the room, empty on the floor, and Harry was pleasantly drunk and pressed against Louis so hard he was surprised he wasn’t hurting him. Louis’s finger tips were digging into his skin and sending thrilling pangs up and down his spine. He pulled away to catch his breath.

“Take off your pants.”

“You do it,” Louis playfully snapped.

Harry started to grin. “Okay.”

He kissed his way down Louis’s chest. He got to his stomach and Louis’s lower back lifted off the ground, his hands wound his Harry’s hair. So, he was doing something pretty right.

He reached his belly button and then the edge of those terribly boring uniform pants that Louis somehow made look so good. Harry snuck a glance at Louis, who shot an impatient glance back, then lightly bit his waist band, lips twisted in a sly smile.

“Fuck you,” Louis groaned. He was doing something really very right. “Oh fuck, I’m so drunk,” he moaned again as Harry unzipped his fly with one hand and ran the middle finger of his other across Louis’s hip bone.

“Well, it’s affecting nothing,” Harry quipped, and Louis laughed despite how he was trying to act mad. He laughed a lot when they were together. It was inconvenient for the sneaking around but nothing Harry would ever want to put to an end. Louis’s laugh was one of the best parts of him. Harry couldn’t stand to hear it from across a room in public.

Harry pulled his pants down to his thighs, and Louis wrapped his hand in Harry’s hair again. Harry slid his free hand to the back of Louis’s hip.

“Hey.”

Harry looked up.

“I fucking love you.”

Harry beamed.

“I fucking love you, too,” he said. “But I was gonna do it anyway.”

Louis laughed again. “No shit.”

The door opened.

And a lot of things happened all at once.

Harry spun around. Louis shot up to a sit. And it was a disgusting thing that had been forced on them since they were kids, but it become instinct for them to slide themselves to as opposite sides of the room as possible. First an assistant came in the room. Then another came in behind him with two men in expensive suits who were just losing the property appraising looks from their faces to be replaced with repulsion and shock. Then behind them in walked Harry’s father.

At this point Louis was almost fully dressed, just finishing the buttons on his shirt, but Harry was still crouched on the floor, shirt undone, hair still all tangled where Louis’d been playing with it. He watched his dad get a swift read of the situation. And he saw the two assistants move immediately to Louis.

Louis.

Fuck.

“No.” Harry stood up.

“Harry, let yourself out back to the house,” said his father.

“No, listen – “

“Harry,” Louis said, already resigned. “Don’t worry, just go.”

And Harry lit on fire with how much he both hated and loved the way Louis naturally fell on someone else’s sword.

“No. Dad.”

Everyone turned to face Harry. It was like they’d forgotten for a second he was Headmaster Avalon’s son, and now they were all shocked by the news. Harry formed the words he wanted to say in his head very carefully, practiced them in his head while he still garnered everyone’s attention. He was scared, yeah, that was true. But Louis had just worked so hard.

“I made him do it.”

“Harry, what the fuck?”

“I’m so sorry,” Harry said to his father, trying really hard not to catch Louis’s eye, because he felt tears coming already and tears sometimes looked like a lie. “I told him it’d help him get out faster. I told him I could get you to graduate him early.”

“No,” Louis insisted. “He did not!”

“Harry,” his father started.

“Don’t listen to him,” Harry continued. “He just doesn’t want to get in trouble with me. He still thinks I can help.”

“Harry.”

“Hey, don’t you do that for me. Don’t you dare do that for me. I am not asking you to – “

“Mr. Tomlinson,” Harry’s dad said. He hated hearing Louis’s name on his lips. “Harry.” He hated hearing his own. “Why don’t you come with me? Gentlemen.” He addressed the two men in suits. “So sorry for the interruption. Mark and Eric here will show you to the kitchen.”

And the assistants and the men in suits left the room. All that was left was Harry, Louis, and Harry’s father, standing in some kind of tense and intimidating triangle, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Harry,” his father said for the one hundredth time this afternoon. “You were a willing participant in this?”

“I told you,” Harry said, his voice somehow still holding strong. “I forced him to do it.”

“Harry, don’t. Seriously.”

“Mr. Tomlinson,” Harry’s father cut over him, “I apologize for my son. Please go back to your room. With your permission, I’d like to inform Dr. Heiman so you can talk about what’s happened in your next session. You’re also free to miss classes for the rest of the week.”

For a second Harry thought Louis was going to punch him. His face flushed bright red then lost all color immediately after. Harry took advantage of his father’s turned back to plead with his eyes – go. Just go, honey. I know you don’t believe it quite yet, but it’s going to hurt so much worse for me if you stay and get in trouble.

The way Louis looked back hurt, too. He looked betrayed, and it occurred to Harry that his inability to see Louis punished might go both ways. A few tears finally fell from Harry’s eyes. By the time he was done wiping them away, Louis was gone.

“Harry.”

Harry was starting to get a Pavlovian response to his own name.

“Please get your things, and go back to the house.”

Harry gathered his things slowly and took the long way home. By the time he got there, there were four attendants waiting in his room.


	18. February 20th, 1967 – 12:10PM

Over the course of the last ten months, Louis had gone as many as two weeks at a time without seeing or speaking to Harry. It had been only five days, and he was about ready to crawl out of his skin.

Before, the times he could see him across the room had been the worst. Times when he’d catch sight of Harry in the library or walking through the grand hall with his father but they hadn’t found a free moment to sneak away together so he had to just watch him there, living his normal life, trying to keep the rush of passion he felt from boiling out of control before he drove himself even crazier than he already was. He studied Harry’s every micro-expression in those moments, searching his face for the same impossible burst of want he felt in himself. The best times were when he got a glance or the faintest hint of his signature sideways smile, and he could take that with him for the next several days until they stole some time together once again.

The times where he saw him and couldn’t have him, those were the ones he really had thought were the lowest points. Because back then he thought if he didn’t see Harry, he could find a way to forget him. But on day five of no contact, no sight of him, nothing, he knew now that absolutely wasn’t true. He was consumed with imagining what was happening to Harry without him. He was sick with anticipation of when he’d see his face again. It was like his illness, except instead of a hundred different thoughts trying to cram their way into his head at once, it was just this one, a hundred times, amplified through an echo chamber every fucking second of the day. He couldn’t avoid it. He woke up, and it was inevitable.

So, on this fifth day, Liam brought both Zayn and Niall to their room to take Louis by the elbows and force him to make it down to lunch. Louis tried to resist. Until Zayn threatened to call out his own hypocrisy and Louis’s pride did what any amount of encouragement could not and got him out of bed.

On their way to the stairs Louis thought he felt a crowd. He clutched his elbows and drew his arms closer in to his chest to try to avoid it. But in actuality, it was probably all in his head.

 

Liam held Louis’s left shoulder and Niall held the right. Zayn walked out in front of them barking at anyone who attempted to stare. Gossip was never terribly overt in this school, but Liam had gathered over the last several days that people had heard what had happened with Harry.

Louis had had a meeting with his counselor that he refused to talk about. Now, of course Liam knew better than to push him. But he could tell by the way Louis had been acting ever since that something had been said in there that Liam probably wouldn’t like. It was fine to have a friend like Louis who rather keep his dark thoughts to himself, but it was difficult when it made it impossible for Liam to defend him. He had had many private conferences with Zayn in as many days and found that Zayn had no more information than he did. Even Niall had tried to get him to come play football. Something in that room just hadn’t gone right.

Lunch was a win, at least, and he was more than ready to get the four of them down to their usual table and put up their usual implied barrier to the outside world, one built with months if not years of accumulated inside jokes and private language. He clutched Louis’s shoulder a little tighter with his right hand, and with his left, attempted to keep Zayn from attacking a particularly nosey kid.

It was impossible to ignore at this point; the halls were full.

The entire overhang that looked out at the grand hall and the building’s entryway was lined with kids two, three rows deep. The stairs were almost full with more of them gathered in groups of fours and fives, and what was most alarming of all was that the assistants, though present in droves, were doing nothing to disperse the crowd and usher them to the cafeteria or back to their rooms.

Liam exchanged a suspicious look with Niall, then glanced at Louis, pleased to see his glossy expression indicate he mostly hadn’t noticed. They got to the stairs themselves and tried to forge a path through, when the front doors burst open, and one by one by two all the kids in the stairs and the hallways came to a hush.

He couldn’t help it. Liam quieted and slowed, too. Almost as soon as he had done so, he wanted to grab Louis and drag him back up to his room. But the kids had closed in behind them, and it was too late.

Headmaster Avalon had already brought Harry into the room.

At first Liam almost didn’t recognize him. The most stand out things about Harry when Liam and the others saw him around the school were the way he dressed and his long curly hair. Now he was ushered in in a standard Avalon uniform that fit him ill and dwarfed his usually lanky frame. And his hair had been cut, his unstoppable waves trying to push their way through some haphazardly applied gel. It took the life out of him, though it occurred to Liam it probably had nothing to do with the clothes and the hair itself, but rather the fact that it had been done to Harry without his permission.

Because that was the most stand out thing about Harry when Liam and the others got a chance to interact with him in person. He glowed. He sat around like he could fit seamlessly into any environment and be comfortable. He was in many ways the opposite of Louis – relaxed, drawn out, carefully pondered. He was, in other ways, Louis’s perfect equal – uncommon, curious, vibrant.

Now he just looked defeated. And Liam’s heart sank at the sight of it. He glanced over at Zayn and it was only upon seeing his terrified expression that Liam came to himself and realized that if he was heartbroken, someone else would be so, so much worse.

He caught Louis’s elbow just before he could take off down the stairs. Niall slid down a step doing the same on the other side. Zayn dove out in front of him.

“No,” was all he said but it had powerful sentiment. Insistent, petulant, frustrated, and deeply sad. Liam couldn’t see Louis’s face, but he was understanding why Zayn looked so terrified. Louis’s skin was turning white for how hard Liam was holding onto him.

“Louis,” Zayn tried, but now he too was having to hold him back.

People were starting to turn and look at them, some muttering sprung up, and so Harry took notice and turned their way, too.

He spotted Louis within seconds. And his face collapsed.

“You need to get him out of here,” Zayn muttered, and Liam didn’t have a problem jumping into action on that. His only instinct right now was to hide Louis away somewhere where he could start, somehow, some way, to feel better.

He grabbed the arm Niall had been holding and pulled Louis to him, wrapping his arms around Louis’s so they were pinned to his side and using his taller frame as an advantage to start hauling him back up the stairs. For better or worse, Louis wasn’t fighting back.

When he got him to the top of the stairs he readjusted his grip to have one arm firmly wrapped around his shoulders, and with Louis’s face now turned to him, Liam thought he heard him say something quiet under his breath, almost like he didn’t even know he was saying it. It was something like,

“Why are they taking so long?”

Liam had to agree. Harry’s dad had him sat there, going through paperwork, while the whole god damn school looked on. And they weren’t the only two to notice, because behind him Liam heard Zayn’s and Niall’s voices pipe up.

“Move the fuck on, would ya?”

“You got nothing fucking better to do?”

“Hey, clear these people out, this ain’t a fucking TV show.”

Liam could only think of getting Louis back to their room. As they drew closer to the hall, he spotted Ashton and his boys emerging from their own neck of the woods and only starting to take in what was going on. He caught Ashton’s eye and said, in the most insistent voice he could,

“Help them.”

Ashton nodded.

“Are you god damn deaf?” Zayn’s voice rung up to them. “Get the fuck back to your room.”

“Hey the lot of you, fuck off!” Michael chimed in. Liam was pretty sure he didn’t even know why he was doing that yet. They were good kids.

He turned Louis down their hall, gripping his shoulder still, more to keep him up than to try to direct him. Louis wasn’t trying to stop from going back now. They got to their door, an assistant a few yards from them giving them an appraising look that Liam answered with a nasty one. He fumbled their bedroom door open.

“Liam?”

Liam almost started crying at just the sound of that, he didn’t even want to call it Louis’s voice. It was so small and inflectionless and sounded as defeated as Harry had looked. If Headmaster Avalon had been in front if him now, Liam’d take a lifetime in here just to strangle that man to death.

“Yeah, Lou?” he responded, his voice betraying none of that.

He turned to face him; Louis look just as glazed over and lost as when they’d found him only now with an added layer of horrorstruck that still left Liam wanting to commit several crimes.

“Is it my fault?”

Yeah. He’d kill that man for sure.

“No, Louis. Louis?” He grabbed either side of his face and pulled him back from where he was staring helplessly down the hall. “No. And you know what?”

Louis blinked at him, looking for an answer.

“We will get him out, too.”

 

Ashton dragged Michael up several stairs and into Calum’s more effectively containing grip. Below them, Zayn was getting dragged away by an orderly for the fight Michael was itching to jump into.

“Michael, stay out of it,” Calum said, and it served to almost instantly calm him.

They’d taken Harry out of the front hall just a few minutes ago, his face finally red with impending tears after much, much too long of a valiant effort. Niall was down talking to a group of orderlies and gesturing to the now parting crowd grandly. He was wearing his glasses which he’d pulled out of his pocket, Ashton knew, to make himself look smarter to those with authority. Ashton had helped a few old friends from the orphanage with 20/20 vision get glass lenses for this very reason.

“Ridiculous,” Niall muttered when he rejoined the group.

“Where’d they take Zayn?” Michael asked.

Niall shrugged. “They won’t tell me. Not the first time it’s happened. He’ll be back soon.”

“So, what,” said Calum, “we’ve gotta get nine people out of here now?”

“That or seven,” Niall said, pointing to the top of the stairs and the hallways behind it. “Cause he’s not leaving without Harry.”

“Hope you’re developing one hell of a plan, boys,” Ashton said and tried not to sound flippant.

But the fact of the matter was this – after what had just gone down, Zayn dragged away, the headmaster’s son now counted in their ranks, and the rest of them all in such high profile as troublemakers, it was going to be even harder to get them all out undetected than before. Ashton rarely used the word impossible; he didn’t like to invite it into his home. But tonight in this grand hall, the energy of confusion and conflict still bouncing off the walls, he could certainly see impossible peeking the hell around the corner.


	19. March 21st, 1967 – 3:13PM

Before long, though the snow was still thick on the ground and the chill still biting the air, technically speaking, spring was upon them. Families once again crowded the ballroom, boys scattered across the room in various states of pleased and displeased to see them. And then there were Ashton and Niall sat at a large round table with a handful of very intimidating fishermen.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Michael whispered as though any of their families were paying attention to them, rather than captured in their own conversation, which consisted mostly of discussing the quality of the school’s teachers and food and congratulating themselves for having the foresight to get their sons “fixed” early on.

“Well,” Calum responded, “I would hope getting us all jobs or else it kind of defeats the point of the visit.”

“Do you think we’d make good dock workers?” Michael said.

Luke started to scrawl on his notepad. This was a regular thing now. Calum was currently annoyed that Luke’s parents hadn’t noticed.

_I think we can lift things. That’s a start._

Luke was a lot funnier than any of them had been able to know before. It was both strange and quite pleasant to get to know him all over again.

“Speak for yourself,” Michael muttered, and he continued to study the scene.

Calum thought they all looked quite intimidating. He tried to imagine himself getting up every day in some snug apartment on the water in Ireland, heading down to the docks at four and five AM, spending the day shooting the shit with a bunch of rough and tumble townies whose dads had all worked the docks and whose dads’ dads had all worked the docks before them.

Before he got too deep into that thought, however, Michael hit his arm, and nodded to their parents. One of the guys who had first welcomed the boys to the home – the one who’d handed out the room assignments - was speaking to them and gesturing for them to collectively follow him out of the room. Calum couldn’t be sure, but the grand way he motioned to the crown molding on the way to the hall surely seemed like a tour. Looked like he and the boys had some time.

“Let’s go walk Ashton’s route,” Calum said.

And the other boys followed him without a word.

 

Calum, Michael, and Luke needn’t worry. Ashton and Niall were, in fact, deep in discussion about their plans for later that June. The three men who had come to meet them were the most Irish people Ashton had ever seen, and that was saying something as he knew Niall. Their names were Patrick, James, and then Other Michael who was really just Michael but Ashton couldn’t give him primary Michael status in his head so this is what he called him. Next to him Niall was taking notes about their daily routine, pay, some vacant apartments they’d heard of that could maybe house up to eight people without turning to squalor.

“Might be nine now,” Niall was saying.

“Well, they were never gonna fit eight comfortably, lad,” Patrick responded, “so if you wanna try for nine that’s really up to you.”

“Not sure about nine at the docks, though,” Other Michael said. “Not even sure about eight. Was thinking when you reached out to us it’d just be you and your boys.” By this of course he meant Liam, Louis, and Zayn.

“Well,” Niall said, “Can’t leave new friends behind just cause they’re new, can we? Besides, some of his boys might be better at the job anyway,” and he nodded to Ash.

“Well, I got a sister with a book shop, always needs a bit of help there,” James told them. “Figure if you’re shoving eight, nine people into one place you’ll save on expenses enough.”

“Appreciate all the help, lads,” Niall said.

“I told you we wouldn’t quickly forget what you did for us in Dublin,” Patrick said, “and I meant it. Always got a helping hand for one of our own.”

Ashton didn’t know if they were orphans like he and Niall or if it was just an Irish thing. By the way their chests all puffed up when they talked about it, he had to assume it was probably the latter.

“Yeah you just tell your friends,” Other Michael shot a glance at Ashton, “to be a bit careful. Things are getting awfully tense up north these days and English voices might not be the most welcome, if you know what I mean.”

Ashton appreciated that at least Other Michael stuck to the suspicious, slightly angry Michael brand.

“Well, the south ain’t got a problem with that, though, have they? Niall said, his voice more concerned than his words let on.

“Not as long as they do an honest day’s work in my opinion,” said Patrick, partially because he meant it and partially, it seemed, to get Other Michael not to say what was really on his mind. It was all too familiar.

“Good,” Niall said. “Then, boys, we’ll be seeing you at Annie’s Café just into June.”

Patrick smiled sideways. “You got a lot of confidence in you, boy.”

Niall nodded at Ashton.

“We got a good group. And a good plan at that.”

“Well then,” Patrick said, “we’ll be there waiting for you.”

The guys left shortly after, taking in the grandiose ballroom and hall with wide eyes and single raised eyebrows. Ashton had to agree with that sentiment. It all seemed a bit much when he remembered where he came from.

He and Niall returned to the hall after walking them out, then looked around and realized there was nothing in here waiting for them, so they wandered back towards the cafeteria where tea would still be sitting out.

“Book store might be good for Harry,” Ashton said, sorting through things already in his mind.

“Yeah,” Niall agreed. “Luke, too, if they’ve got the room.”

“Your boys get first dibs, you know,” Ashton said. “At the jobs and things. It’s your arrangement. But mine are first out the door, because it’s my plan.”

Niall nodded. “We work well together, you know.”

“We do. We could go into business together.” He furrowed his brow. “Don’t know what sort we’d open though.”

Niall chuckled. “An orphanage.”

“Oh, that’s dark,” Ashton laughed.

He watched Niall prepare his tea carefully with the uncertainty of someone who still hadn’t, after however many years, gotten a hang of this tea thing the English are so obsessed with. There were a couple of things he wanted to say to Niall, mostly having to do with his doubts around this whole escape plan. Ashton knew that if anyone was going to understand how hard this would be, it’d be Niall. But he thought it best not to dash morale when they’d just made all these plans. So he poured his own tea in silence instead.

“Do you think your boys would take these jobs?” Niall said.

Ashton raised an eyebrow. “I think my boys’d be strippers if it meant our own apartment, living by our own rules. Don’t you think the same?”

“Dunno,” Niall said thoughtfully, still a bit too focused on his tea. “Not even sure all my boys are committed to leaving to be honest with you.”

Ashton froze with his sugar spoon in the air. “Why the hell not?”

Niall seemed to be thinking over how to explain it.

“How long have you boys been here? What, six, seven months?”

Ashton knew immediately. “Six months, three weeks.”

“Right, so you’re still pretty fresh into a new adventure. And besides,” Niall said, “no sooner do you get here than you’re meeting us and then planning an escape.”

Ashton nodded. He thought he knew where this was going, his mind flashing back to that months old conversation he’d had with Mikey in the back halls to the kitchen, back when they’d first decided to leave.

“It’s been quite a while since we’ve had something new to rally us together. We’ve been doing the same thing, day in day out, same hardships, same dramas, same, fucking, meals and shit. Day in. Day out. For going on years now.” He walked them back towards the door. “To be honest, until you boys came along, we hadn’t even hung out together the way we all do, listening to records and stuff, in quite a while. Everyone’s got their own stuff, I suppose. You know, Louis started seeing Harry, that got pretty serious. Liam started writing and hanging out with Zayn. And Zayn, he’s always sort of got his own thing going on.”

Ashton thoughtfully stirred his tea. “It’s not new anymore.”

“Exactly,” said Niall. “I gotta say, I know it sounds strange, but I was surprised everyone even agreed to your plan in the first place. I don’t know.” He sighed. “I hope some of them take the jobs.”

Ashton thought of his own group. “They’ll do it to go with you.”

Niall laughed, and Ashton didn’t like the sound of it.

“Well,” he said. “That’s certainly a very nice thought.”

They sidestepped the scene in the ballroom and went back upstairs to their room.

 

Michael had insisted he remembered exactly the way Ashton had taken him, so naturally they’d spent the last twenty minutes being lost. Now, they were inexplicably somewhere on the third floor.

“I just don’t get why, if we were going from the first floor to the basement, we ever thought it’d make sense to go up stairs,” Calum said.

Michael practically growled.

“Because!” he snapped. “Sometimes you have to go down and up on the other side of something to get to a different…fucking…wing…”

He was getting too frustrated to speak. It was standard Michael.

Luke tapped the both of them on the shoulder at the next hallway and motioned to a painting of a knight on a white horse that Michael had made fun of earlier. Of course this meant they’d somehow gone in a circle, and Michael threw up his hands in response to it. Calum just laughed.

“So, we’ll all just follow Ashton then,” he said.

Luke scribbled, _We really should learn it in case we get separated._

“Or in case Ashton does something stupid,” Michael said, and they all knew exactly which stupid thing he was referring to.

“We’ll think of something,” Calum said, ever optimistic about it. “We’ll make sure he gets out.”

“We’ll make sure _you_ get out, man,” Michael said. “The both of you. Neither of you deserve to be here even a fucking little bit. At least Luke and I genuinely got fucked up heads.”

Luke nodded. He strangely liked when Michael grouped them together.

“We’ll all get out,” Calum said again. “And if we don’t then we’ll all stay. Simple as that. But Luke is right, actually. We should learn the route. I think we went wrong somewhere back at that statue of the fat lady.” And he led them back the way they came down the hall.

But Michael wasn’t letting this go.

“No, hey, Calum,” he said. “You’re not staying here if Ash or one of the rest of us gets left behind. If you can get out, you get out, okay? You gotta promise me that. I mean, I think we should all promise that before we go. Whoever can get out of here has to go.”

Luke nodded, but Calum shrugged as if they weren’t discussing the very turning point of their entire futures.

“Mikey, come on,” he said. “We’ve done everything else together. I get this place isn’t the fucking greatest, but we’ll stick it out until we’re eighteen, and we’ll all get let out together. Only better for Niall’s boys anyway if it happens. And I’m not saying it will, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t see the point in me taking off without you all. Was she this way or back by the stairs?”

Luke pointed down the left hand hall. Calum nodded.

“I think you’re right.”

“No. Calum,” Michael continued on. “Were you not fucking there when Avalon dragged his own damn son through a firing squad into the school? This place is fucked, man. And they don’t fucking like you. I mean, you know,” he got temporarily distracted trying to track their progress, “not you personally. Just people like you. Are we sure this is the right way?”

“Yeah, Luke’s writing it down.”

Luke held up a map where he was starting to sketch the route.

“Well, shit,” said Michael, looking it over. “Wait. Don’t change the subject.”

“You changed it,” Calum said, casually directing them down the next flight of stairs.

Michael thought about that. “Yes. Okay. But Calum - ”

Calum stopped mid-step.

“Mikey,” he said, and they all stopped, too. “What are you trying to do? You want to split us up? You want me to leave you?”

Michael couldn’t seem to respond to that. No matter how he felt, how they both did, about Calum’s situation, he couldn’t ever say he wanted that.

So, Luke jumped in to defend him.

 _You have to think about how this is different for you_ , he wrote.

Calum read it and shook his head in confusion.

Luke scribbled again,

_We can get better._

Calum still looked confused, but only for a few seconds. Then he just looked annoyed by it.

Michael read what Luke wrote and jumped back in.

“He’s right, man. Luke and I can get better. Ashton’s out of here at eighteen no matter what. Even if they keep him to the next semester, that’s still only six more months. How do you test out of a place like this?”

Luke touched Michael’s arm to get a word in and then wrote,

_And where do you go if you don’t?_

Calum rolled his eyes at them; it was an expression Luke was unused to seeing on his face, one that was frustrated, dismissive to the point of almost being callous. He turned like he was going to just walk away from them, but he didn’t. Instead he threw up his arms and broached a conversation they’d all been avoiding for months.

“Well, where the fuck do I go if I do?”

 

Zayn’s sisters were in the middle of a snowball fight. His mother was walking the grounds with Liam’s, reassuring themselves that this place they’d chosen to raise their sons was safe and picturesque enough to help them recover. Neither of their fathers had shown.

Liam and Zayn were contributing to the lie by building a massive snowman. They’d only built the base so far, a huge globe of snow that was already up to Zayn’s thighs. He couldn’t imagine they’d have an easy time stacking on the rest of it, but Liam was working steadily towards the vision nonetheless, dutifully collecting what he called “useful snow” at Zayn’s feet in a pile he hoped to form into the mid section.

Zayn was sneaking in a cigarette while his family wasn’t looking.

“You see Lou yet today?” he asked, Liam still pushing snow below him.

“Yeah, saw him at breakfast. He’s with his sisters, which is good.”

“Yeah,” Zayn agreed. “Wasn’t sure that he’d show.”

“He’s still trying,” Liam said, and it sounded defensive. He and Liam hadn’t talked about New Years Eve since it happened, but he could tell by the tone of his voice that he still remembered everything Zayn said. And did.

“Trying to what?” Zayn said, partially, he hated to admit, because he thought it’d piss Liam off.

“To get out of here,” Liam said, as if it were obvious, though Zayn wasn’t sure how it would be considering Louis hardly left his room anymore.

“You really think Avalon’s gonna let him?”

“Well, Harry did take the fall,” Liam said, but he didn’t believe it any more than Zayn did. They didn’t need Louis to tell them how that first exit strat review had gone after he and Harry were caught.

“Yeah,” Zayn said, “and he’ll never see the light of day again.”

Harry’s room had an assistant outside it 24/7, and he was accompanied from class to class. He never ate in the cafeteria with the others. He was under constant surveillance, so none of them had spoken to him since the morning of Valentine’s Day before he and Louis took off.

“Not until we leave anyway,” Liam said. He plopped down in front of the pile of snow he’d created and commenced shaping it into a ball.

“Liam,” Zayn said, his heart swelling at the same time as his stomach sank watching Liam attempt to be so many kinds of optimistic at once. He sat down at the pile of snow across from him and started to help.

Liam was willfully ignoring his tone, Zayn could tell. As they worked to shape the snow, their gloved hands brushed up against each other and Zayn squeezed his fingers for a second before letting it go. A smile flitted across Liam’s lips.

“You’re not gonna come with us, are you?” Liam said.

Zayn should not have been surprised that Liam picked up on this. He picked up on everything. He was a tremendously good friend. To all of them.

“I don’t think so,” Zayn said.

“I don’t mean come with us to Ireland, I knew that,” he said, almost like a child demonstrating they did the reading in class. “I mean you’re staying here, aren’t you?”

Zayn nodded. He wished he could find a way to explain it, but there were too many words for him even to start.

Liam smiled sadly. “You’re breaking up the band.”

“Band’s been broken for a while,” Zayn said quietly.

But Liam shook his head. “Not for me, it’s hasn’t,” he said. And it wasn’t angry or insistent, it was just his view of things. Liam could disagree with you without making a big thing of it. This is why they’d gotten closer and he and Louis had grown farther apart.

“Well, you and I are known for seeing things pretty differently,” Zayn said.

Liam smiled, and this time it was almost mischievous.

“Is that what we’re known for?”

Zayn smiled, and it was almost embarrassed. “Amongst other things.”

They continued to sit in the snow, the cold and wet soaking into the backs of their pant legs. Liam persisted with their pile of snow, but Zayn eventually turned to watch his sisters, whose snowball fight had gotten playfully aggressive. He chuckled when his mother had to intervene.

“I don’t think I could not see them,” he told Liam. Liam followed Zayn’s gaze to his sisters. “I don’t understand how Louis can go knowing he might not be able to come back home.”

He didn’t think until he said it about the fact that Liam was leaving behind sisters and parents, too.

“Louis wants to live life on his terms,” Liam said significantly. “I like that. I rather think it’s what I want, too. And besides, he’ll find a way to see them. Louis can find a way to do anything if he really wants to.”

“So, you really think he’s gonna do it?” Zayn said, a challenge.

Liam stopped messing with the snow.

“He said he will, so he will. And we’re gonna take Harry, too, so I don’t really see what would stop him.”

Zayn shrugged. “Laziness,” he said. “Being scared.” He knew Louis, so he knew the first thing was a defensive mechanism covering the other. The old “I’m not doing it because I don’t feel like it” lie they all at one point have told themselves.

Liam stacked his arms on top of their giant snowball and rested his chin there, his big warm eyes slowly melting Zayn’s chill. He smiled at Zayn in a way that revealed for the first time that Liam had the upper hand. Maybe he always had. After all, he was the one who chose to come see Zayn, and Zayn was the one lying in bed unable to leave his room.

“Sometimes you just gotta do things that scare you, Zayn. Especially when life doesn’t leave you any other reasonable choice.”

Zayn pulled himself closer until he was flush against the snow as well. He leaned in until he was just a few inches from Liam’s face, and Liam didn’t move nor did his expression change.

“I know that, Liam.”

“Good,” Liam said. “So what are you gonna do the day we go?”

Zayn shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” and Liam leaned in closer, “what you’re scared of is moving your life forward, of standing out and saying, you know, these are my decisions and I’m responsible for their consequences. Of not going with the tide anymore. And this.” He pointed at a place in the snow between them and grazed Zayn’s hand with his own. “This is your first chance to be your own person, to show yourself and everyone else who you really are when you stand on your own.” He spoke confidently. There wasn’t a question anywhere in there. “So, you’ve got to decide. Who are you gonna be in this situation? What are you gonna do as your first act of being alone? Are you gonna hole up in your room and wish the best for us? Or are you gonna do something to help?”

Zayn swallowed. His legs itched to run, but he stayed put.

“What the hell am I supposed to even do?” he said.

Liam leaned back. His distance let a tension out Zayn hadn’t realized had been there, and it ushered back in a biting cold he hadn’t realized had been missing. Liam shrugged.

“It’s your first act as you, Zayn,” he said simply. “So, I can’t have anything to do with it.”

Zayn held his eyes.

“You will anyway, you know.”

Liam smiled but almost wryly.

“We all will, man. There’s no avoiding it, not after everything we’ve been through. But,” and he stood up, “I am glad you understand that. Now.” He gestured to the giant mass of snow Zayn still leaned on. “How’re we gonna get that all the way up here?”

Zayn eyed the even more massive snowball they’d built in the first place and tested the structural integrity of this second one. It simply wasn’t going to happen. But he stood up anyway, looked over the situation they’d got themselves in and thought of something that could actually work quite well. He smiled.

“Maybe our snowman’s just taking a nap.”

Liam’s face lit up the way Zayn hadn’t seen it do in a while. As always, his own expression mirrored the joy of it. It was hard for it not to, and he didn’t much feel like trying to stop it anyway. That was just what it was like being around Liam. For one moment he allowed himself to be cripplingly miserable about all that getting left behind. Then he put that feeling away again.

“Yes,” Liam said. “Brilliant. Hold on. I’ll find sticks that can make slits for eyes.” And he took off into the yard.

Zayn crouched down into the snow again and got back to work.

 

Finally Luke, Michael and Cal had made it to the basement. They were still in the middle of a terrible argument, the worst they’d probably ever had. But the whole thing had to be carried out at a whisper so no one caught onto the secret passageways Ashton had forged.

“And you’re really fucking forgetting,” Calum hissed, mostly at Michael who was doing the majority of the arguing, if only because logistically it was easier on the move, “that most of Niall’s boys have got the same god damn problem I have. It’s just that’s not the reason they’re here in the first place. Doesn’t mean they’re not gonna get just as much shit on the outside.”

“So what’s your god damn point?” Michael shot back. “That we’re all fucked so fuck it? All I’m saying is you’re gonna have way more luck with a bunch of random Irishmen who’ve got no idea who the fuck you are than here where everyone’s got a full fucking record on you.”

“My point is, everywhere is, to some degree, shit. But everywhere is also better when we’re with each other.”

“Yeah, man,” Michael said flippantly. “I read that Dr. Seuss book, too. All I’m saying is don’t be ignorant and acknowledge that your parents shoved you in here for no fucking reason and if you don’t get the fuck out of here you’re well on your god damn way to being a lifer.”

“I can fake being recovered, Michael.” Calum reserved “Michael” for when he was really pissed. For example, right the fuck now.

“Well that sounds easy and incredibly pleasant.”

Calum spun to face him. “Look – “

But Luke caught him by the shoulders instead, placing himself in between the two of them but facing Calum. It occurred to Calum that Luke had developed his oft worn puppy dog face simply to encourage Ashton to reconcile arguments. So, it made sense that he didn’t wear it now. Still, it was unusual to see him look so serious.

And lost for words. That sounded strange, Calum knew, as Luke never used words. But he was never lost for them. He simply opted out. Now he impatiently tapped his pencil on his notepad and struggled until finally he started to write something that took him a good amount of time. Michael tried to lean in and preview it, but Luke shoved him out of the way.

Finally, he handed it over, to Calum specifically, and Calum was surprised to see it was just seven words with countless other rejected ones making a halo of scratched pencil around them. Calum read them a few times before handing the notepad over to Michael and sitting down on the nearest empty patch of floor. As Michael read those seven words, Calum turned them over and over in his head:

_People will like you how you are._

It had never occurred to Calum before that he was hiding. He’d never thought about how, at times, without really acknowledging it, he thought he deserved to be here.

As Luke and Michael took seats on either side of him, Calum tried to imagine the four of them living on their own. He tried to picture working every day, buying groceries, living on a budget. At first the image was mostly blank spaces, huge patches of black mystery he wasn’t quite sure how to fill in. But the more he thought of it, the richer the image became, like when you get several chapters into a book and you remember what all the characters look like so that you can imagine them making specific faces. Some corners of the scene were still empty, and probably always would be. But piece by piece Calum started to understand a world where he could be considered normal.

“I can’t get arrested in here,” he said quietly, but not motivated this time by secrecy.

“In here,” Michael said passionately, “you already are.”

Luke handed him his handkerchief. Calum hadn’t noticed that he’d been crying. He caught sight of Luke’s notebook, those seven words still visible, scrawled on the top page, and took it onto his own lap, flipping behind them until he found Luke’s rough sketch of a map.

“Thing is,” he said, “it’s not about what the distraction is.” He started to draw the floor above the one Luke had drawn from memory so they had an even more complete picture of the school. “It’s more about where.”

 

Louis still kind of saw everything through a fog. His meals, the chalkboards during class, the faces of the other patients, even his friends. Right now, for instance, he was watching his middle sister reading the twins a book she had found in their library during the family tour. Why they had to take a tour ever time, Louis didn’t understand. This place never changed. He, of course, hadn’t accompanied them to the library. Not because he hadn’t tried but because down the hall from it he’d started to have a panic attack. The worst kind. The sort you never see coming. Like a rug being pulled out from under you; first air, then not. The assistants had dragged him away so he didn’t upset the other families. So he didn’t break the illusion that kids came here to get better.

Anyway, so really he just assumed Fiz had gotten the book there when actually he had no clue. All he knew was that as he watched her now, she could have been anyone. She really could have been his mother, they looked so much alike. And she had his youngest sisters perched so attentively next to her it really made quite the scene. Fiz was only thirteen years old.

And Lottie, in front of him, was fourteen. And she, unlike him, was seeing things very clearly. He could tell by the piercing way she watched him watch their sisters. Her eyes were an even icier color than his own. They saw each other quite clearly, under normal circumstances, in situations where Louis wasn’t spiraling out of control.

“You said you had something to tell me?” Lottie said in the tone of voice that meant she wasn’t about to let a line like that go.

That is what Louis had said, a few months ago on the phone. But that was before everything. That was back when he still had a plan.

“I forget,” he said, even knowing it was a lost cause to avoid her.

She grabbed his chin and turned him away from their sisters. Lottie had no patience for his illness, and to be honest it was the way Louis preferred everyone to handle it. Just ignore it. Every other way was unbearably awkward.

“Bullocks,” she said, simply.

“Hey, who taught you to swear?” Louis shot.

“Who the fuck you think?” she replied, throwing a dismissive gesture in his direction.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah.” That was very fair.

“Well?” she said.

“What?” he spat back.

“What the fuck do you got to tell me?”

Lottie had never looked this old before. She was wearing these ridiculously big hoop earrings and she had on all this makeup, ice blue shadow to match her eyes and bubble gum pink lips. She was wearing a sweater he thought must have belonged to his mother once, and her nails were talons tapping impatiently on the table between them.

He thought for a second about letting her go.

What would it be like, to leave them and maybe not come back until they were even older than this? How much would the twins change over the course of a year, two? When he finally could see them again, would they look like Lottie? Older? What would they learn without him and what would they not? And what’s more, how much of this was ever supposed to be his responsibility? If he asked his mother, would she want him to go? Would she hold her hands to his cheeks and tell him to go make himself happy, that she could handle it on her own? Or would she cry and tell him she needed him? Would she remind him of all the times he had been the only man in the house? Would she tell him to remember he’d only ever belong at home?

“Hey,” Lottie was snapping at their sister. “Get them milk or something from the kitchen before it closes.”

Fiz rolled her eyes but dutifully set aside the book to take the twins to the kitchen. Lottie watched them leave like a hawk. When they reached the door, she whipped back around to Louis.

“Better?” she said.

Louis smiled wryly. “So you’re the man of the house now, are ya?”

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, a secret handshake passed between one Tomlinson kid and another.

It had never occurred to Louis before how much they had in common. How much could only be common to the five of them, and no one else in the entire world. He leaned in to Lottie.

“Do you understand what’s wrong with me?”

“Yeah, obviously,” Lottie replied.

“No, I mean,” Louis swallowed. “Do you understand why they’re keeping me here and not letting me get out like I planned?”

It took a second longer for Lottie to nod to that one.

“Is Mom mad?”

Lottie did another shrugging eye roll, but it wasn’t directed at him. “I don’t even think she understands it. You know where she lives.”

Louis chuckled. “Up in the clouds.”

This had been a joke with them since they were little.

Lottie started to look nervous. “They really not letting you go?”

Louis took a deep breath. “What if I told you I could get out anyway?”

“I’d say do it.” She didn’t even hesitate. Maybe he’d already done a well enough job with them to move on. Maybe he’d done better than he knew.

“I could get in trouble.”

“Not if they don’t catch you, you won’t.”

“The first place they’ll look,” he said quietly, “is back at home with you lot. They’ll think you’ve done it. You know what that means, don’t you?”

It meant he couldn’t be there. She got it. Lottie looked a little shaken, but still she just nodded. Louis stuck out a finger pointed squarely at her nose. Her eyes half crossed to look at it and she wore a crooked smile to match his own.

“You wouldn’t tell me to do this just to screw with me, would you?”

She chuckled in that guarded way that meant she was getting older.

“No,” she drawled. Then she straightened in her chair. “You’ll be happy with your friends. So that’s what you should do.”

Louis lowered his accusatory gesture, deflated by her surprising sincerity. Instead, he rested that hand on her arm until she took it in her own hand and squeezed it, self-consciously let it go.

“I might not be happy anywhere, Lots.”

She shook her head, rejecting the very idea of it.

“Course you will. You’ll figure it out. You figure out everything.”

“That’s not true,” he said, sad, a faint hint of melodrama. “I’ve never figured out A-level maths.”

She chuckled again. “Fuck you.”

“Stop swearing!”

“Fuck you,” she insisted.

He smiled. “Fine.”

Fiz and the twins wandered back in with tea and milk and a carefully balanced handful of biscuits between them. They joined Louis and Lottie at the table and so Louis couldn’t say much more. But when his mother came back in, causing a stir with the twins as they rushed to share all she’d missed during her consultation with Louis’s teachers, Louis took the opportunity to lean in to Lottie and rest his chin on her shoulder. She rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be a scaredy cat, Louis,” she said.

And she walked off to help the twins put on their coats.

 

Ashton and Niall leaned over Calum’s drawing at the library table while Calum himself, Michael, and Luke hovered over them and waited. Ashton was sketching out his own versions of the maps on parchment paper he’d swiped from the kitchen, and laying them over each other so he could see through all the levels of the building.

“Our room’s over the first floor classrooms,” Niall muttered to him.

“Right,” and he readjusted a few sheets, made a few notes.

“I’m telling you guys, it works,” Michael insisted on Calum’s behalf. “And it knocks out like six birds with one stone.”

“Well, it’s fine,” Ashton slightly conceded, “and it’s either going to be the best idea to keep eyes off us, or it’s going to backfire in our faces. What made you think of it?”

Calum shrugged. “I was thinking of the night they brought Harry in here. It was hard to find anyone in a crowd that night. Except Harry himself.”

Niall was shaking his head. “I see your point, but if you wanna recreate that night, you’ve gotta have a distraction just as compelling. And not just to the other boys, to the staff as well. How’re you gonna create a Headmaster’s Son Getting Admitted level interest?”

The three boys exchanged glances.

“We’re still working that out…” Calum started, but Luke hit him lightly on the arm. Ashton knew this meant Cal was holding back.

“What were you thinking?” he pushed.

“It’s not me,” said Calum, and they both looked to Michael.

Michael and Ashton locked eyes.

“You’re not gonna like it,” Michael said.

“How do you kn – “

“You’re really, really not gonna fucking like it.”

Ashton flipped through the extensive rolodex of shit Michael did that he didn’t approve of. Only one seemed as grave as Michael’s face was right now. Ashton let out a long sigh.

“Who’s on the chopping block, then, Mikey? You?”

“What do you mean?” Niall said.

“Ash – “

“Well, I can’t be sure,” Ashton said, “but my guess is Michael’s plan involves leaving someone behind as the distraction. Which was my god damn plan in the first place.”

“You’re not gonna do something as serious as we need to – “

“Move on from it, Michael, we’re not going to – “

“I’m admitting that you were right! Isn’t that an anomalous enough fucking occurrence to give me one fucking second to - “

“Your fucking job was to figure out how we didn’t have to do that, not substitute in yourself!”

“The way you planned it was never gonna fucking work, that’s why we – “

“No, fucking forget it. We’re going back to me staying and that’s it.”

“Fellas – “ Niall tried.

“Ashton.”

Michael’s voice commanded his attention. He knelt down in front of him, looking him dead in the eye, which is something he really didn’t do with anyone, even when he was mad. Which meant it wasn’t about yelling at him. It was about Ashton listening. So he did.

“I’m not a kid anymore. And I don’t need your help. This is a better idea than you, what, running around banging some damn pots and pans? This isn’t me acting up. This isn’t me being out of control. I’m in control of this. I’m better. I’ve got this.”

Ashton shook his head. He believed him, but he didn’t want to, because believing him meant he had to let him go.

“Mikey,” he said. “What the hell are you gonna do?”

“Fellas,” Niall tried again. This time they paid attention. “Where’s Luke?”

 

The four of them darted back into the grand hall, having exhausted the kitchen, all of their rooms, and the immediate circle of yard outside the school doors. The ballroom was still crowded with family members, but most now wore coats and were pushing through tearful goodbyes on their way to the door. Niall watched Liam hug his family goodbye and thought how hard it must be for Liam and how quickly they were probably able to forget about him once they were back at home. He tried not to be too bitter about the parents who had sent the boys here. After all, it’d been a blessing for him, hadn’t it? He just remembered how much his parents loved him, how they hadn’t had any choice but to get taken away, how they’d have stuck together no matter what if they did.

The other boys had spotted him. Of all places, Luke was sat at a card table in the corner opposite Zayn, his sketchbook with his and Calum’s maps open between them and his own communications jotted into the corner. Niall caught sight of the words “drive a crowd” and “plain sight” before he caught eyes with Zayn, who looked both scared and more awake and alive than Niall might have ever seen him.

“What’s going on, man?” he said.

Zayn’s eyes sparkled. “I’ll do it.”

Michael shot glances between the two of them. “Hey. No, wait – “

But Luke held up a hand and Michael stopped. Luke looked to Zayn to provide an explanation to all of them, but when he spoke, he spoke only to Niall.

“I’m gonna stay anyway, man - ”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“ - and I had this talk with Liam, and I think he’s right about me – “

“What are you gonna do, Zayn?”

“He’s usually right about all of us, isn’t he? And I…I don’t wanna be a screw up. I don’t wanna be a fucking joke.”

“Zayn.”

“Don’t worry, Niall,” Zayn said, a smile even playing at his lips. “I’m just gonna get you all home.”


	20. April 3rd, 1967 – 7:24PM

Harry’s guardian’s name was Randall. He was thirty-five years old and he had two children, a thirteen year old son named David and a ten year old daughter named Georgiana. That had been his grandmother’s name. Randall had worked for Avalon for six years now and had worked for Grace Church Hospital in Manchester before it. He’d been married to his wife for over fifteen years; they were high school sweethearts. Randall liked shepherd’s pie for dinner, only tea for dessert, and he followed Harry twelve hours out of the day.

To class, to therapy, to the bathroom, to dinner on the first night, though after that he’d decided to take dinner in his room. He wasn’t allowed to eat with the others anyway, and he couldn’t stand being in the same room as Louis. What’s more, he could tell Louis couldn’t stand it either, so it was just easier to eat in here. There was a cold half pork chop in front of him now, and Randall just outside his door. He was in the middle of Raymond Chandler’s _The Big Sleep_ upon a recommendation from Harry after talking about how much he’d loved _Strangers On A Train._ It was easier to get to know Randall than ignore him. It was his only distraction. Sometimes he thought it was the only thing keeping him sane.

Coming here had turned into a game of keep away between him and Louis, one he hated as much as he needed it. It involved asking Randall to take him the long way to classes, avoiding common spaces, and eating dinner in his room like he did now. He knew it was what his father would want, and that angered him. But in the end the illusion it gave – that he was a partner in his own recovery – was an unavoidable byproduct of what he really needed. Which was to not hurt all the damn time. To not feel that dramatic sinking in his stomach when he turned a corner and ran face first into a life he couldn’t have anymore. Fortunately, he’d learned a lot of Louis’s routine with the intent of “accidentally” intercepting it over the past year or so, so now it was committed to memory and easy to reverse. He was quite good at it. And very, very lonely.

Outside the door he heard Randall share a brief exchange with a co-worker about their schedules. Harry waited for the man to move on before peeking his head out the door.

“Where are you in the book, Randall?” he said.

Randall started at his voice, but only slightly. He was rather used to these kinds of interruptions.

“Oh, Marlowe just confronted Brody about the nudey pics. Think the Carmen chick’s gonna mess it all up.”

“Well, she’s very angry that she’s been violated. It’s hard to be reasonable like that.”

“Hm,” Randall nodded, wrapping his head around the concept of a woman with complex emotions. “You, uh, want a book from the library? We can head over there before lights out.”

Harry shook his head a little too quickly. “No. Thank you. I’ll let you get back to yours.”

Randall nodded. “Bill will be here shortly.”

“Sounds good.”

Harry shut the door, went to lay in his bed, and tried to distract himself from thoughts of the library and those first few weeks spent smiling at Louis’s inquiries and pretending he was just a nice kid interested in his father’s students. He tried even harder to not think about their kiss against the school, and every kiss since then. Of course, any decent psychologist can tell you trying not to think of a thing just makes you think of it. And so, Harry pulled the covers over his head and started to cry.


	21. May 9th, 1967 – 3:33PM

Niall said start to pack. They’d be leaving in three weeks.

Liam looked at the modestly sized school bag he was allowed and his practical side said, you know, socks and underwear. But the impractical side, the side cultivated throughout his time being friends with Louis and Zayn, tried to figure out what few things he could take that would represent the time he’d spent in here, or at least the parts he’d want to take with him. One of Zayn’s comic books? One of Niall’s records? The paper airplane Louis taught him how to fold on one of the first days they were friends?

The task was overwhelming him and exacerbating the side of him that had planted him in here in the first place. He was folding and refolding, stacking and restacking a small pile of sweaters when there was a knock at the door that let the tension out of him immediately. Niall and Louis greeted him on the other side.

“Come on,” Louis said, hints of his old smile on his face.

Even on his better days, Louis looked older and more worn than when he’d first arrived at Avalon. Even before everything with Harry these last months, his smiles had caveats, little asterisks like you see in newspaper advertisements that said you probably couldn’t really get what you’d been promised. That was something they’d all take with them, whether they liked it or not. But right now, Louis’s face said something else, something he’d brought with him here in the first place and might still be able to carry away – that no matter what you’re denied, there’s always something unexpected around the corner. And that something always has half a chance of being great.

“Where we going today?” Liam said, a smile to reflect Louis’s inevitably reaching his face.

“Top of the world, of course.”

No one was allowed in the bell tower, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to stop them. On the fourth floor Louis got them lost in a crowd of oncoming students just let out of a class and by the time they hit the attic stairs they were without any attendants at all. Usually there’d be someone watching the door to the tower, but Niall said Ashton said they were on a shift change, which Liam believed because Ashton seemed to know just about everything about this place. Just around the corner through a door a voiced called out “Boo!” and Liam nearly fell back over the threshold. It was Zayn, ducked inside having a drag, the smoke from which was floating up the last set of steps and freeing itself into the fresh air.

“Took you losers long enough,” he said, following closely behind Louis up the steps.

“We do things right,” Louis said, “not quickly.”

“Not what Harry says,” Zayn said.

“Zayn,” Liam shot. But he and Zayn both knew he could get away with it.

Louis stopped and turned to face him. With the advantage of the steps, he was a few inches taller than Zayn, and when he bent in closer they were literally nose to nose.

Liam could see his eyes were sad, but his smile was bright and sly.

“Wouldn’t you love to know?” he simpered.

And Zayn had nothing but a crooked smile in return. Louis burst the rest of the way up the steps, jumping two at a time.

“Check out the view, boys.”

And indeed it was quite beautiful. Liam had been up here once before, of course with the boys, of course lead by Louis and Zayn during only the second week they were friends. That was when they were still exploding and Niall and Liam were just along for the consequences. Now, their spark had faded, but Liam liked the look of Louis on the other side of it – scarred with thick skin; hurt and tougher for it. More himself than Liam had seen him in ages. He breathed easier to know Louis thrived on pain; Liam hadn’t necessarily expected that. But he knew there’d be a lot of pain to come for them, and this was a comfort.

What about him? He thought it over as he circled the tower. Who would he be when he was torn apart? He tried to imagine, as he had so many times these last months, what it’d be like with these three boys on the outside. What was Ireland like? How soon would Zayn leave them?

It always got there so quickly, and he hated how unable he was to put himself first. Before he even wondered about his family, his own health, he wondered about Zayn and what would become of that fire they’d lit on New Years at the chime of midnight. He could hear Louis every time, telling him to focus, telling him Zayn would never put him first and so he should do the same.

But that just wasn’t how Liam was built. He didn’t think it was how Louis was built either, but it was who he was trying to build himself into. He watched Louis now and wondered if he didn’t have the right idea. After all, he’d seen Louis crippled before, by Zayn’s indifference, by losing Harry, by having to show up here in the first place. And now, he stood in the face of all of it, and still stood. And Liam couldn’t even take five minutes to think of himself.

So he sat. On the edge of the lookout at the front of the tower. And faced the thawing grounds and the woods and world beyond them. He swung one leg over the stone wall so he was both safe in the tower and falling. And he forced himself to concentrate, to see past the way the tree line wasn’t straight or how the tops of all the fur trees didn’t come to an equal point. He sat and concentrated on what it’d be like to be not only outside this school but outside these woods, outside everything he’d called home. He tried to imagine doing it without the other boys, a possibility Niall had tried to prepare them for for months and which Liam had steadily ignored. He tried to imagine himself alone, all alone. Until he realized that wasn’t what he was here for. And he felt the warmth of one of the boys’ hands on his shoulder. He hadn’t realized he’d closed them until he opened his eyes.

“How you feeling, brother?” Niall said looking out over the grounds, too.

“Myself,” Liam offered. Niall nodded like he understood.

“Liam, Zayn says don’t do it.” Louis came up on the other side of him.

“Louis was unconcerned,” Zayn said, on Louis’s farther side.

“Well, I only said I knew you’d never do it,” said Louis.

Liam smiled at them. “You never know what I’ll do, really.”

Louis shrugged. “Fair play there, Payno. But I still say you’d never do it like this. Not when you’d be so…” He gestured vaguely to the ground. “…uneven.”

Liam chuckled. “That’s true.”

“Besides,” Louis continued, “you wouldn’t fall anyway, not you. No, you’d just…”

He trailed off but Zayn finished.

“Fly.”

Liam nodded slowly. It was all starting to settle on to him like a great weight and it almost constricted his chest.

“Maybe I could,” he said, trying to keep his voice even for the sake of the others. “But I don’t know if I could just take off on you all like that.”

Everyone was quiet, the gusts of warmer spring air getting trapped in the tower and the great bell behind them swaying and clanging delicately in response.

“Jesus,” Niall breathed. “This place is terrible. Why the hell am I gonna miss it?”

“It wasn’t all bad,” Louis said, and Liam knew every single thing he was thinking back on.

“No,” said Liam, “sometimes it was actually quite good.”

Niall nodded; Zayn just took a long drag on his smoke, now hardly more than a filter between his fingers.

He shook his head. “Wish I’d seen it the same way you do, boys.”

Liam almost responded, but was surprised to hear Louis get there first.

“Us, too.”

They stayed up there until the sun had abandoned the sky for its second home behind the line of dense trees. They stayed telling stories, retelling them with all the different ways they remembered it. Stories of food fights, holidays, shitty family visits. Of causing trouble, of mending it, of all the stolen places in this building that would forever be theirs. Because as much as the attendants followed you, and for as many other students as you ever liked or didn’t like or didn’t even know, there were moments – so, so many of them – that could only belong to them. And Liam knew that no matter where they went, or where Zayn did, or when they ever saw each other again, those moments would bind them, even in times where they might wish that they wouldn’t. Maybe one day Liam would fly, but he could never really fly away. He could only ever get as far as the tether he had tied to these boys, and life wouldn’t let him break it.

By the time it got too cold for their thin shirts it was completely dark. They slid back into the school still unnoticed. They parted ways at the third staircase to head to their rooms and tidy up their uniforms for dinner. Of course, Liam made his way with Louis, who walked next to him, head down, eyes on the ground but really off someplace else entirely. Liam concentrated again, tried to imagine Louis off in Ireland or someplace else much different. And he could see it. Clearly. Louis living some other life, whichever life he wanted. And when he pictured that – Louis in some tiny apartment over a tea shop screaming about football scores – he could so easily picture himself there with him, trying not to burn dinner, rolling his eyes with Niall at Louis’s incessant complaining. And in that way, Liam slowly started to imagine his own future.


	22. May 20th, 1967 – 5:14AM

They had forty six minutes until morning technically started.

That was when the first alarm bell would go off to send the first round of boys to their shared bathrooms to start the day. In forty six minutes the halls would start to fill with still half sleeping patients, stumbling forth from their rooms like zombies, tentative, croaked conversations springing up and sounding the start of the day. In forty six minutes the eyes would be on them as they meandered to the restrooms, organized their pre-set packages of shower toiletries, and lined up for their turns in the stalls. In less than one hour, Calum, Luke, Michael and Ashton would no longer be alone. But right now, as the sun itself was still deciding if it was ready to stumble forth or not, they were congregating in the great hall, not another soul in sight, nervous giggles the only things penetrating the early morning silence.

Ashton wedged the front door open and it creaked, probably not enough for anyone to hear, but so loud to the four of them their giggles got louder and even more nervous.

“Sh. Shut up,” Ashton laughed. “Take this.”

He was passing out coffee in stolen mugs. Calum squeezed one tight, feeling the warmth bleed into his fingers. It was the first fine morning of the year.

Winter had a way of clinging to England longer than Calum thought was really necessary. It had snowed in the middle of April this year, long after Ashton had promised Michael they’d seen the last of its seemingly incessant hold. Now the ground was a little damp but clear and the air was a little brisk but not biting as it had been before. This was going to be the first really warm day to mark 1967 and Calum thought it was a fitting day for their goodbyes.

He was still trying to decide if he’d miss this place as Ashton and Michael spread out a wool blanket borrowed from Michael’s room. He and the boys settled down on it and faced the school, Luke clutching the notepad he never went anywhere without these days. Ashton fixed it so the blanket covered all their legs against the lingering chill and they all looked up at what had been their home for the better part of a year. It was still fast asleep. In forty minutes, though, it’d wake up.

“It looks different like this,” Michael said, and that had been exactly what Calum had been thinking.

“It looks sinister,” Ashton said. That had been kind of what Calum had been thinking, too.

 _No people_ , Luke wrote, and Calum knew exactly what he meant.

As Calum had predicted months ago on that first day, this place wasn’t so bad when it was filled with decent kids. But when left to its own devices it was all the things it pretended not to be during the day – cold, callous, and dull. It was huge and felt empty and acted just as indifferent as the institution in the city they thought they’d watched burn to the ground. The truth was, it was just a disguise Avalon wore to get trusting parents to give up their struggling kids. It was just as closed off to change and difference. It was still a place where you ended up feeling lost or defeated. Calum had tried not to think much about that this year. But now that the end was in sight, he let his blinders down and stared at the ugly face of the thing that tried to change him. He marveled that he had almost let it.

“Well,” said Ashton, “take a good long look, boys. After next week this might be the last home we have for a while.”

Luke shook his head as Michael said, “Not true. We always got one of those. Just might be the last roof we see until we get to Ireland.”

“Michael, I’m still skeptical about you as a dock worker,” said Ashton.

“Me too,” Michael agreed, and Ashton laughed.

Luke jotted something down and passed it directly to Michael.

 _I’m gonna be great_.

“Yeah, okay, okay…”

Calum took a long sip of coffee and concentrated on the warmth crawling deeper and deeper inside of him. He felt himself get jostled and looked over to see Luke smiling. Calum smiled back; he couldn’t help it if he wanted to.

“You know,” he said, “you have a way of making me forget where I’m headed.”

He meant the whole group of them, and also he didn’t.

Behind Luke, Michael broke out in a makeshift song about how they were all headed to hell while Ashton howled with laughter and sang the guitar parts he thought it needed. Luke picked up his notepad and set it back down. With a glance in their rowdy direction, he leaned over to Calum, his chin rested on Cal’s shoulder and, undetected, whispered

“You’ll be fine.”

Then he turned just as quickly away and started writing Michael suggestions on future verses. Calum felt his face heat up and the rest of him follow suit. When he looked back at the school, it didn’t look as scary as when they’d first come out here. And maybe that was because it was only twenty minutes until the alarm bell now, and the sun had decided to come up after all.

But probably it was because when he looked at it now, he saw the way around it. It was just…some building. Sat in some random field in some random town in England. There would always be buildings in fields in towns, and some would smile and some most assuredly would not. But there was always a way around them.

Ashton grabbed his shoulder and pulled him from his own head, one of many benefits of being Ashton’s friend. He had already memorized the chorus to Michael’s invented song and he was singing it, quite loudly and with no regard to the people trying to sleep indoors. For a second, Calum thought about scolding them all for garnering attention so close to their planned escape. But in the end he just started singing along, as faces popped into windows to see what all the noise was, as orderlies emerged from the front door just short of six to take in the unusual scene.

Four boys, sat together, singing nonsense at the top of their lungs about going to hell. It was the most accurate representation of the last year – the last several – that Calum could ever imagine.

And he looked forward to taking this show on the road.


	23. June 1st, 1967 – 8:50AM

“Okay,” Louis said, in as soothing of a voice as he could muster when his best friend had a knife poised over his wrist. “We have ten minutes.”

Zayn had to stop calling himself that. Louis’s best friend. He knew that wasn’t true anymore. He just had to figure out what else he could be called.

“What do you think,” he asked, “just trace over the old ones?”

“No, you fucking fool,” Louis said with considerably less calm. “Those ones you actually wanted to work. Just go across. Here. Like fucking idiots do.”

“Right.”

They were crouched together in a closet in a second floor hallway about ten yards away from some bore named Randall who was asleep on the job. They’d been in here since all the rooms had emptied for breakfast an hour ago. The others were in the dining hall like nothing was going on. Zayn was housing plain bread and apples that they’d snagged after dinner the night before so he didn’t pass out too soon. There was a whole fuck of a lot riding on some shitty attendant finding him.

Louis was nervously wringing his hands, which Zayn knew, in his usual condition, was a fucking epic show of self restraint. In his current one, this practically made him a superhero.

“Hey,” he said. Louis momentarily paused gripping his hands. “Drop by my room on the way out and grab my wallet thing.”

“The one with the pot in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, thanks for the parting gift, Zayn, but I rather not waste the time.”

“It’s got other stuff in it, too, okay? Stuff I don’t need as much as you. And I fucking count the pot in that.” He nodded at Louis’s resumed wringing hands. “So just promise me you’ll stop and get it, okay?”

“Whatever, man.”

Zayn shook his head. Louis’s fancy ass watch said five to nine.

“You ever gonna forgive me?”

Louis shook his head in turn. “Forgive you for what?”

Zayn shrugged. “For me not being who you thought I was gonna be.”

Louis smiled sadly; it read more like a grimace. He refused to take his eyes off the door for a long moment.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath, his voice demonstrating a similar level of restraint as his hands did earlier. He was furious. And sad. Maybe just a little ashamed somehow. They may not be best friends anymore, but Zayn knew him well enough to know that.

“Zayn,” he said, finally sparing Zayn a glance, “that is not the order that sentence goes in, and you fucking know it.”

He looked at his watch.

“It’s nine o’clock.”

And the first bell rang. Somewhere below them, hundreds of kids were pouring out of the cafeteria and heading to the upper floors to start their classes. Somewhere ten yards or so to their right, Randall had to stop dozing on the job.

Zayn took a breath. He tried to remember the last time he did this. It didn’t hurt. He poised the knife over his skin, first the right way, then, remembering, the wrong way. Hovered above him, Louis’s whole demeanor changed. He was no longer guarded or upset. His face was flush with worry, and his hands hovered over Zayn’s and the knife. They caught each other’s eyes.

“Are you fucking sure you wanna do this?”

“Get my shit,” Zayn said.

“For fucks sake, man – “

“I’m sure.”

Louis exhaled. “Oh, fuck – “

But in Zayn’s mind, it was already done.

 

Louis stumbled out of the closet and hit the opposite wall. There were so many kids already in the halls that his senses immediately hit overload and he forgot to ensure no one saw him. He turned, rested his forehead on the wall, and tried to breathe. He couldn’t. He tried to focus on one single thought, tried to remember what he was supposed to do next. He couldn’t do that either. A few people brushed against his back and he jumped like they’d given him electric shocks. From behind him came a voice he didn’t recognize.

“Oh, shit…”

And he took off.

“Sir? Sir!”

Kids around him still calling, more now. Some gasping. More calls for someone named Sir. Not Sir. Randall. Louis tried to focus enough to register the attendant shoot up from his seat to head for the closet. Leaving his post unattended. Louis slipped inside the door.

Sensory deprivation.

Like a rug pulled out from under him, total quiet, total calm. Only one other person in the room.

He had to take a minute to calm his heart. Which meant for a few moments he just stood there with nothing to say.

“Lou?”

Harry’s voice brought him back. Louis closed his eyes, took one last, deep breath that pushed all his insides clear of his lungs and filled him with life. When he opened them he saw a boy who he thought at first couldn’t be Harry. He’d forgotten they cut his hair; he looked paler and thinner than before. Like he’d been dying in here.

“What’s going on out there?”

Louis could hear now the outside had reached full commotion. Without hesitation, Louis held out his hand and said what Harry had been saying to him as far back as one lousy month after they met.

“Leave with me.”

But Harry didn’t reach for him back.

“I can’t.”

It was a punch to the gut. Louis deflated.

“What?”

“Louis, I can’t.” He was practically cowering against his desk, and he had a hard time keeping Louis’s eye. “He’ll never speak to me again.”

After only a moment’s blinding confusion, Louis found himself reeling back through all the times they’d stolen for themselves over the past year, and of every time Harry asked him. Are you okay? And every time Louis said fine. And every time Louis asked him. Are you okay? And every time the answer.

I’m better now.

He thought about neatly piled Christmas presents that had pretty immediately been ignored. He thought of Harry sitting alone in this room on Christmas morning and still having a smile to share when Louis arrived. He couldn’t stop thinking of the day he was admitted to Avalon and the look on his face, not of defiance or defeat, but of complacency. He thought of all the times he himself had put up an imaginary divider between them and of just how imaginary it was. He thought all of these things, and he still held out his hand.

“Harry,” he said, insistent. “Fuck him. And leave with me. Please.”

The commotion outside was still in full swing. But sooner or later, they’d stabilize Zayn enough to take him away, and their moment would be gone. Harry still cowered by the desk. He looked at Louis’s hand, tempted, but still he shook his head.

“No, Louis, you’re not getting it,” Harry said, tears creeping into his voice. “He’ll never…speak to me again.”

Louis was on the verge of just grabbing him when he finally heard what Harry was saying to him. University. San Francisco. A little apartment all their own. This was life with Harry when he graduated. Not when he ran away.

He saw the panic in Harry’s eyes and he made a mental note that, when he had time, he had to have strong words with his past self, the one who’d assumed anything about Harry and had played a part in making Harry feel so different. Right now, there was no time. There was only time to make it better.

So, he moved across the room, wrapped his outstretched hand around Harry’s bicep and pulled him into his arms. Harry fell into him like he lacked any resistance at all. He laid his forehead on Louis’s shoulder, and Louis gripped his other arm as well.

“I don’t give a shit, Harry,” he said. “I want you to leave with me. I don’t care where the hell we go.”

Harry lifted his forehead and rested it against Louis’s. Louis ran one hand through Harry’s shorn hair and watched a self-conscious look run across Harry’s face. So, Louis kissed him.

“Do you believe me?” he whispered.

Harry nodded and both their heads moved.

“I believe you.”

“Okay.”

Louis pulled back from him though his body ached to stay, and took Harry’s hand in his own. He tried to look confident. He tried to be enough for them both.

“Then run.”

 

Liam and Niall met Ashton and the others at the top of the staircase on the second floor at three past nine exactly. Everything looked relatively normal so the six of them took their time heading to the corner where they said they’d meet the others. Liam shot questioning glances at Ashton – weren’t they meant to be causing some kind of distraction? But before he could get an answer, a few of the boys ahead of them picked up their pace and chatter started growing from the far end of the hall. Someone cried out. And Ashton quickened his pace.

“Is this it?” Liam asked, his stomach starting to twist with nerves.

“You two lag and make sure you find Louis,” Ashton whispered, and he and the other boys pulled ahead. This was all part of the plan, but it still made Liam even more nervous.

Niall could sense it. “We’re okay, man. Just keep your head down. Louis will be right where he’s supposed to.”

By the time they reached the other end of the hall it was packed with kids and attendants alike. They were pooled around one particular area several yards away. Niall slowed them and pretended to look interested, which was good for the rouse, but Liam didn’t have to pretend. He struggled to look over heads, to catch a glimpse of what the other boys had done. Curiosity aside, it definitely seemed to have worked.

It was ten past now, and Ashton and his boys were trying to slow to wait for them without looking obvious. He could see Ashton getting frustrated.

“Niall – “ Liam started, but Niall grabbed his arm.

Down the hall, through the crowd, two heads bobbed towards them, and sure enough, a few moments after, Louis and Harry emerged. It was silly, Liam thought. He’d expected them to be in some kind of disguise, but of course that would be far more obvious than just a couple of boys in uniform. He was relieved. For a moment. Until he realized this wasn’t all of them.

Louis grabbed Liam’s arm as soon as he reached him and started to pull.

“Hey.”

“Let’s go, Liam,” Louis said. Niall was leaving as well.

“No – “

“Liam,” Louis said. “Let’s go.”

“What are you doing, you’re supposed to be with – “

“Let’s move, boys,” Ashton said. They’d reached him. “We’ve got seven minutes until the kitchen closes.”

They were all walking so fast. Louis kept pulling him, but Liam kept turning around. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

“Where is he?” he said.

“Liam – “

“Where is he?” he insisted.

“He wanted to do this, man,” Niall said.

Louis hissed, “You knew he wasn’t coming with us.”

Liam jumped to look over the heads of the crowd. “He didn’t say he wasn’t going to leave.”

“Liam, man, I’m sorry,” Niall said.

“Hey,” Ashton shot, “you didn’t fucking tell him?”

“That’s fucking fucked up,” Michael muttered.

“We’re sorry,” Niall said to them and to Liam both.

But Liam wasn’t really hearing him. Or any of them. Zayn never said he wasn’t going to leave. What the hell had he done?

“Hey. Liam.”

Louis stopped him at the end of the hall, grabbed him by his shoulders, and the others stopped reluctantly in turn.

“No – “ Liam started. But he didn’t know how to finish this.

“Hey,” Louis tried again, and Liam tried to look at him. “He chose this, man. He doesn’t want us anymore. Liam.” Liam caught his eye. “He chose this. He’ll be alright.”

He was having a hard time breathing. Is this what Louis felt like? The room was spinning out of control.

“He doesn’t know what he chose,” was all he could think to say.

Louis shook his head, frustrated. “You know what, maybe not. But he did it anyway. Didn’t he?”

“Liam.”

“Guys, I’m giving you one minute and we’re going on our own.”

“I got this,” Niall said. Then back to him, “Liam. Man. Don’t leave us, okay? Louis and I?” He chuckled. “We don’t work without you. Don’t leave us. Okay? We still want this, you know? What he made here? We’re not done with it yet.”

It would take him years, probably, to understand why Zayn was. Done with it, that is. But right now, he had seconds. He looked at Niall’s face, then Louis’s. Each of them pleaded with him in their own way. He looked back at the crowd, still strong but starting to dissipate, and tried to imagine Zayn here on his own. The thing was, he could picture it. He could even picture the two of them meeting up again some day. The only thing he couldn’t picture was not saying goodbye.

“Liam.”

Louis’s voice was so quiet, Liam didn’t think it’d even been his until he turned back to see. He was holding on, just barely. To something Liam couldn’t quite see right now. But his face was clear – if Liam left he wasn’t sure he could hold onto it anymore. Niall was right. This was what they’d built for themselves; it had sustained them now for years. And they weren’t done with it just yet.

Neither was he.

He looked one last time at the crowd of people gathered at the other end of the hall. But he still couldn’t see him. So he laid a hand each on Louis’s and Niall’s shoulders and pushed them through the staircase door.

 

They slid through the kitchen with a minute to spare. Ashton could hear the cleaning crew pouring in seconds after the door shut behind them. They were traversing a massive, dank basement that Ashton had only been in once before. There were no lights that wouldn’t give them away from the outside. There should be a staircase coming up on them. Somewhere. He hoped.

“How’re we doing on time?” Calum checked.

“I can’t see my watch,” Louis replied.

“It’s nine eighteen,” Ashton said.

“How do you know?” asked Michael.

“I’ve been counting.”

“Jesus, you’re good at this,” Michael muttered in return.

Ashton would have to remember to say thank you later. Just as his heart was starting to race in his chest, his foot hit the first stair.

“Got ‘em.”

The stairs leveled out at an overhead basement hatch that led directly into the side yard, concealed from plain view behind a tool shed and an old out of use water pump. It was locked. And as accounted for, Niall pulled a paper clip from his pants pocket and within the minute the padlock had clattered to the floor.

Ashton moved for the door.

“Wait for me,” he said, and threw the first panel open.

The light was blinding, the wind too cold, and he was disoriented for a second before he could take a look around. It felt so real. That was a weird thing to say, but true of anything you spent months and months planning in your head. Nothing is ever how you think it’ll be, even if it all goes how you’d wanted it. There’s always something about it that will surprise you, no matter how much you plan. You’re never quite expecting the color of this sky, or the feel of the wind.

“We’re good,” he whispered back down to the others.

Niall was the first to pull himself through. He turned and reached back to help out Liam. Calum and Luke crawled out next and hunched beside Ashton while Harry then Louis made their way to the outside world. Ashton reached his hand down for one more.

“Oh. Shit.” Michael’s voice sounded muffled; he was turned away.

“Michael?”

Then it got clearer.

“Go.”

Ashton took a few steps back in.

“No, Ash, go!” And Michael pushed him back out.

“He’s fine, go,” Ashton shot at the others and Calum and Luke took off after Niall and the others.

They stuck to the edges of the school all the way around the northeast corner to the back. Every door they passed was like a landmine with an unpredictable trigger. Ashton and Michael were several paces behind the others, but Ashton preferred it that way – he wanted to keep an eye on their surroundings. They were about fifty yards from their break away point, the nearest point to the woods.

“Who was it?” Ashton finally hissed when they were nestled in a stretch between two bays of windows.

“Who?”

“Who saw?”

“No one,” Michael badly lied.

“Michael.”

“I don’t know,” he corrected. “I didn’t see him. We took off.”

Ashton swallowed. “Okay.”

Niall reached the far corner of the school. This was the worst part.

There was no avoiding it. They had to cross another good fifty yards between the school and the tree line; that was as short of a distance as there was. And now, between Liam’s indecision, Louis’s quick stop at Zayn’s room and their temporary intruder, they were a good twenty minutes outside of their own distraction. The halls would be cleared now. And while their plan had accounted for this – most of the workers involved would be walking the opposite path they were to the hospital wing on the other side of the school – the return to normal was a blow either way.

To top it all off, they were going the wrong way.

There was a break in the trees at a forty five degree angle to their right. It took a few steps longer to get to, but it dumped them out square on a trail that would take them back through the woods and eventually out to the main road without passing by the Headmaster’s house, which sat in the center of these trees. They were nervous, so they were cutting the most direct B-line they could. They’d have to search for the trail instead. And it was Ashton’s fault. He was supposed to be up front.

“Shit,” he muttered and jogged to catch up with the others. He assumed Michael was following him.

He was not.

One of the back doors popped open.

“There you are,” Ashton heard someone say. “Just what are you up to?”

Michael didn’t even glance in their direction. He just stepped around the side of the door so the orderly was facing away from where the others were hitting the woods. Ashton stood just outside the tree line where the others had already taken cover, frozen.

Until the orderly started to drag Michael away.

“No.”

“Go with him.”

Ashton whipped around to see Calum and Luke a few yard away, but it wasn’t Calum’s voice he’d heard. He blinked in shock. But Luke only nudged him away.

“We’ll be okay. Go with him.”

For one second – one single solitary moment in time – Ashton allowed himself to be sick and tired of it. Of being this old when he was only seventeen. Of being so helpless and out of control. Of being feet away from something different just to watch it get taken away. In that one second he just felt exhausted and as scared as he should be for someone his age. And then the moment passed. And he was ready again. He nodded to the boys.

“Two months,” he said. “We’ll find you when we’re out.”

They nodded in return, and disappeared into the woods.

“Hey,” Ashton called when he was plenty far from the others, “hurry up, it’s this way. Oh, shit.” He feigned surprise at the sight of the orderly, but Michael’s shock was real.

“What are you doing?” Michael sputtered.

Ashton smiled. “Welp. Apparently getting caught. Sorry – Jim is it?” Ashton said, reading the man’s name tag. “I was trying to show him this place I found that’d make a good pitch.”

The orderly was appropriately suspicious, but he loosened his grip on Michael nonetheless.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” he said, lamely.

Ashton laid a hand on Michael’s shoulder and squeezed. He could feel the tension let out of Michael from underneath his palm. And that meant the tension let out of Ashton as well.

“Well, then we’ll head back inside. Thanks, Jim.”

“What the fuck,” Michael uttered as they headed back into the school.

“Did you know Luke talked?”

“What?”

“I think we did that, Mikey.”

“Ash, what the hell are – “

“Two months,” Ashton said, already a mantra that’d get him through. “And I’m eighteen. You think we can come up with another plan by then?”

Michael raised an eyebrow and smiled.

“Please, I’ve already got like ten in my head.”

“Well then let’s move you into my room and hear ‘em.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Language,” Jim said.

“Yeah, you fucking know it.”


	24. June 1st, 1967 – 9:44AM

The woods were calm, damp, and shielded by a breeze’s white noise. The six remaining boys moved in silence along the path Ashton had laid out for them, Niall and Liam up front and two sets of boys gripping each other’s hands behind them. Somewhere around twenty minutes in, things started to look familiar to Louis, and he could feel Harry’s fingers tense within his own to confirm it.

“It should branch off this way,” Niall called back to them. “Ash said in four miles it’d hit the road.”

“Then what?” Liam said. Louis knew understanding all the steps of something was important for him to keep calm.

“Then we follow it east, I guess,” Niall said. “We gotta get to the train to get to the shore.”

“The train?” Calum fretted. “We’re already spending money we don’t have.”

“I’ve got some,” Louis said, and patted his coat pocket to make sure he still had Zayn’s billfold.

“We don’t need it.”

Harry stopped walking. Louis refused to let go of him, so he was pulled to a stop as well. He need only glance around for a second to see they were at a fork in the path, and Harry’s eyes were fixated down the branch of it they weren’t supposed to go down. For one horrible moment Louis thought he was going to lose his resolve, to leave him. Until he saw how calm Harry looked now, and he let all that go.

“What’re you thinking?” he asked, his voice sure.

Harry scrunched his nose in thought. “I want to help,” he said.

“It’s okay, Harry,” Niall said. “Let’s just keep going on.”

“No,” Harry said simply, still staring down the alternate path. “I have a better idea.”

Louis looked at him sideways but nodded. “I trust you.” He turned to the others. “Come on.”

And to his surprise, Luke was the first to follow. Which meant Calum came with them, too. Liam and finally Niall came in pursuit and soon they were all headed down the path Louis had taken over Christmas, straight to Harry’s old house. Right to the headmaster’s door.

Louis wanted to believe he was in his right mind, but still the closer Harry led them to his own back garden the more nervous Louis got. He still clung determinedly to Harry’s right hand, and Harry led him just as determinedly towards their own certain doom. But Louis let go; whatever came of this, he’d handle that, too. If this was going to work – if any of it ever was – he had to let go of just a little control and trust him.

Then, just as he thought Niall was going to go mad with the nonsense of it, Harry led them another way.

 

The B512 wound around the Avalon Home for At Risk Boys on three of four sides. In the back, it sat at a greater distance to account for a plot of private land set into the woods. The only sign of this land was an unmarked dirt lane that snuck off the B512 and wound into the dense trees. It was this unmarked dirt lane that a sky blue Lincoln Continental squealed out of, onto the B512, with a tire’s scream and a cloud of burning smoke.

The top was down and Louis was driving with Harry in a fit of giggles beside him; Liam as well, squeezed into the passenger’s seat on the other side. Niall, Luke, and Calum lined the back seat watching as the driveway got smaller and smaller behind them, the school somewhere through the trees doing the same.

In front of them stretched a hundred and fifty miles until their next destination. Whatever was after that, they’d just have to make up as they went along.


End file.
